


Daughter of Eve

by zvi



Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter
Genre: Character of Color, NaNoWriMo, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2008-11-01
Updated: 2008-11-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 02:15:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 45
Words: 48,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zvi/pseuds/zvi





	1. Chapter 1

There was a warmth on my right side, a coolness on my left. The blanket was pushed to the end of the bed, but I was comfortable. Being that deep underground means the temperature is even, controlled. I opened my eyes, but I knew who was in bed with me. Nathaniel's hair was in a braid for sleeping, but I could smell the vanilla of him, his hair and skin, and I was comfortable.

Then the ringing which had woken me repeated, and I rolled to the other side of the bed. It was Richard, I knew from the ringtone. I couldn't imagine why he was calling me. It was early, but not crazy, scary, bad news early, closer to eight o'clock, I thought. (I can feel the sun rise and the moon set, even this far underground, but I've never been great at telling the time of day from the sky.) I picked up the phone and said, "Yes, Richard?"

"Anita, I can't come tonight." He sounded strained and too quiet, but he was shielding so I couldn't feel his emotions directly. Mostly I was glad of that, but it sounded like Richard might need girly comforting, and that's easier to do when I can feel his emotions directly.

"What's wrong? Is your mom okay?"

Richard laughed. "My mom is _fine_, don't worry about her. This is…have you seen the papers today?"

"No, you woke me up." What on earth could he be getting at? If it had been some sort of attack, the police would have called me directly. At least, I _hope_ they would have called me directly. Dolph and I were still not on the best of terms. And there weren't any big court cases or elections pending. I'm behind on my reading, but I would have heard about something like that.

"Sylvie's been outed. It's not on the front page. It's being run as a local human interest story, but…."

"Is that going to be a big problem for her?" I realized that I didn't know much about Sylvie, outside of the pack. She's Richard's Geri, the wolf next in line to kill him and take over Thronos Rokke, and her girlfriend Gwen knows what she is, but I had no idea if her family knew—no idea if she had family _to_ to know—or what she did for a living, or anything like that.

"She's a public defender, so it shouldn't but…," said Richard.

There was an awfully big but in there, yeah. Lycanthropy is a disease, but it doesn't actually impair a major life function, so it's not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, like you might think. And people are people. Even though she'd been doing her job as a lawyer for years, even though the most opportunity for danger in a court room was probably from papercuts, even though Sylvie was working for the public good, helping people who had nowhere else to go. There was a big but of hatred she was going to run into, from her co-workers and opponents. Probably from judges. Missouri isn't one of the states with varmint laws, where you can get off for killing someone if they test the corpse and it's lycanthropy-positive. But it's been on the ballots twice in the past ten years.

"That's…bad, Richard, but I'm not sure what it has to do with our date."

He sighed, not loud, not so I think he intended for me to hear it, but he did sigh. "I can't come to any of Jean Claude's places, I can't be seen with any of Jean Claude's people. And you are probably the best known member of his entourage, Anita."

"So, you're not _postponing_ our date, you're canceling it." I lay down on the bed now, let all of the tension flow out of my body. There'd been a second there when I had thought Richard's call had meant I would have to do something, run out and protect someone. But no, it was the same rejection I'd been getting from him for ages. Too much monster for his man.

"I'm postponing it until we figure out how this got out and deal with the leak," he said. "I'm not postponing it forever. But I'm a schoolteacher, Anita, I work with kids. I don't want people to think I'm the Big Bad Wolf."

"I get it, Richard," I said. And the hell of it was, I did get it. Richard would lose his job, and it wouldn't be fair to him or the kids, if someone figured out that he's a lycanthrope. "I'll tell Jean Claude." I sighed, and felt arms around me and a cloud of vanilla drift over my skin. "Is there anyone else who isn't going to come around the circus?"

"I…don't know," said Richard. "I haven't had a chance to really talk to anyone yet. I'm taking a minute before school starts, because I didn't want to wait and call you while you were with a client."

"Okay," I said. "Okay." I leaned back into the comfort of Nathaniel's arms, let myself open up to him a little. I could feel that he loved me, and I needed that right then, just the little boost to my ego. Then I straightened up, pulled forward a little, because I don't need babying. "Call me when you know something more definite. Call me if you need me to…." I shrugged, because I wasn't going to say that he could call me to kill someone on an unsecured line. Also, frankly, I wasn't sure I would kill someone just for speaking out of turn. A punishment for disloyalty was definitely in order, or a warning about sticking one's nose in when it didn't belong, but death seemed a too steep price for the revelation, however much it might disrupt Sylvie's life.

"You're the _bolverk_," Richard confirmed. "If we need you, we'll call you." He hung up.

I put the phone down on the side of the bed, and lay back down myself. I was due at least another couple hours of sleep before I got up for work, and I didn't see any reason to rush off.

"That was Richard," said Nathaniel. He curled himself around me carefully. I think he was afraid I was mad, which, granted, is the way conversations with Richard end up a lot.

"Yeah, that was Richard." Hmm, Nathaniel was right. I was mad. I bet he could smell it. "Sylvie's been outed in the paper. He doesn't know how. He's going to stay away from all the businesses, all of our people, until the person who leaked the story is caught."

"Oh," said Nathaniel. "Yeah."


	2. Chapter 2

Nathaniel put his hands on my stomach, put his mouth to my neck. "I think that, probably, this is not about you."

"What?" I said.

Nathaniel whuffed a little at my neck, then pulled himself further down on my body, put his head between my breasts. "I don't think Richard decided not to see you because of you. Because he's having problem with you as a killer or a monster. Or because he's having problems with himself that way." He pressed a kiss between my breasts, stroked his hand over my belly. "I think this is about his job. And as long as he's a school teacher, his job is going to be a problem for him."

I felt my body's relaxation under Nathaniel's clever hands, and knew I was being managed. I hate being managed. I'm fully aware that I am that difficult, that my guys usually do need to tiptoe around me. I'm glad that people don't try to make me mad. But being managed like that makes me feel like a spoiled brat. Which just makes me angrier, of course, which is what all the management is trying to avoid. So, instead of snapping at Nathaniel to stop touching me, an outcome I'm not entirely sure I really wanted anyway, I took a deep breath and counted to ten. And then to ten again, just to make sure. "You're probably right, but it's stepping all over some bad memories for me."

Nathaniel nodded and said, "Richard's the only one, though."

"The only one what?"

"The only one of your harem who has that issue. Everybody else is out. And considering—." He cut himself off abruptly.

I just knew that the next words out of his mouth would have been something about how damn large my harem was, and I blushed. I had never wanted any other life than monogamy, but fate or something had other plans for me. Whatever, this giant polyamorous orgy was working for me, and I wouldn't fight it anymore. I would still blush, but I wouldn't fight. "It's early," I said. "Should we go back to sleep?"

Nathaniel's stomach rumbled in answer. He gave me a kiss, then rolled out of bed with a liquid grace that was extraordinary even for a shapeshifter, even for a stripper. "You want me to bring anything back?"

"No," I said. "I'll come with you. I think I'm awake now, and I know I could use coffee."

Nathaniel laughed as he went through his morning stretching routine. "Saying you could use coffee is a lot like saying anyone else could stand some oxygen. Sometimes I wonder that we don't just keep caffiene pills on hand and feed them to you when you're cranky."

I got up and pulled my t-shirt down so it covered my ass. I mean, I had underwear on, but even with just Nathaniel in the room, I didn't want my ass just hanging out there. "It's not just the caffeine though. I like the taste and the heat. Watch your eyes." I closed my own eyes and flicked on a bedside lamp. The bathroom light was on, so we weren't completely in the dark, but I wasn't going to be able to find my black robe in this room with the over the top black decor without more light than that. I opened my eyes and looked at the bed, with the black comforter and black silk sheets. The carpet, which was covered in rugs that were black and midnight blue and one maroon one by the bed, and the black nightstand, chair, and wardrobe. "Why did I let Jean Claude put us in this black hole?" I asked. "It's a really pretty black hole, but it's going to give me SAD."

"Because you're being punished?" said Nathaniel. He reached over my head to the bed post and pulled my robe off, handed it to me. "Do you need me to put on a shirt?"

I looked at him. You almost couldn't tell his curly, auburn hair reached his ankles when he had it in a French braid like it was now. His eyes were a clear, pure lilac, pretty and wide in a face that had grown out of being pretty in the last year or so. His body was beautiful. It had been beautiful since I met him, and it was no less so now. He was wearing a teeny, tiny pair of blue shorts. He would have happily gone naked, and, truthfully, no one who was allowed access to the lower levels of the circus would have batted an eye at a naked wereleopard walking around, but I wasn't comfortable with nudity in general. And I wasn't comfortable with nudity in Nathaniel's case because he was my animal to call, and mine in a way that none of the other men in my life was. He was bound to me, and I didn't share well with others. "Just put on something bigger on the bottom," I said. "Your ass is hanging out of those shorts."

He nodded and bent under the bed for the suitcases we were living out of. It hadn't seemed to make that much sense to bring a whole lot of stuff or get in a chest of drawers for a month long stay at the Circus, especially since Jean Claude kept a partial back up wardrobe for all of us here. But living here, it had turned out that, day to day, the three of us, Micah, Nathaniel, and I, wore a lot of casual clothes that Jean Claude wasn't all that interested in providing. The suitcases were annoying, and I sort of regretted not having gotten some proper furniture. But we were going back to my house in another week, maybe two, so it didn't seem worth it to make any kind of fuss.

Nathaniel put on a much looser pair of shorts that reached mid-thigh, just pulled them over what he was already wearing, and we left the room.

Getting food at the Circus of the Damned was pretty peculiar. Most of the regular residents were vampires, and didn't need to eat. Shapeshifters and witches who came were usually overnight guests. When Jean Claude and I had agreed that 'punishment' for me and Jason 'running away' would be a visibly shorter leash, he'd set up a spare room with a dorm sized fridge, a hotplate, and a coffeemaker. Nathaniel had been…displeased would be too strong a word, but he was the one who typically took care of feeding us at home, and my kitchen was really his. That set up had been clearly inadequate.

So we took over a corner of the commercial kitchen upstairs, where the hot dogs and milkshakes and other junk food the tourists bought so they could throw up in fear at what they saw at the Circus could be puked up. I found it weird and disorienting: too big, too sugary, too empty. But Nathaniel was a pretty deft hand at getting my coffee done and coming up with something for me to eat that I would eat, and he'd even scammed a tiny little folding table so we had someplace to eat. It worked well enough, and that was the important part.


	3. Chapter 3

There's nothing I really like about eating breakfast, but I have to eat or everything else—the ardeur, the bloodlust I sometimes get when a beast comes too far forward—gets far too prominent. It's like that old saw, "If you can't eat, sleep," except that if I don't eat, I need to fight or fuck.

Nathaniel cooked us steak and eggs in about fifteen minutes (we like our steaks bloody, but the eggs well done), and we ate nearly as fast. I lingered over the coffee a bit, and then I said, "I wish MIcah had a less normal schedule."

"You put him in charge of the Coalition. Who else could you have trusted with it? Not one of the solitaries, not one of the animal groups that are mostly blood-kin. The hyenas and the rats have too much strength, too much power already. No one would have joined if they had been in charge."

"I know," I said. "But I miss him. He's got a nine to five job, and I'm just getting up at ten most days."

"Well, if you have to raise the dead in teh dark…," Nathaniel said, and shrugged, as if to say, "What can you do?"

"I don't, actually," I said.

"You don't?"

"No. I can raise the dead during the day. It takes a little more power, but not that much more. And most of the time, people aren't asking me to raise anyone very difficult, just someone who died within the last year."

"You could change your hours, then."

"That might make more sense, anyway. I mean, if I have to do vampire-related stuff, it's usually in the middle of the night, anyway. This would keep the two things more separate."

"Yeah, although you might wind up exhausted. I mean, it would be like working a double-shift. You'd ahve to eat more, more of…." He trailed off, but I knew exactly what he meant.

"I can't have any more sex than I'm already having." I blushed. "I mean, I probably could physically have more sex, but I don't have the time, and I definitely don't have enough partners."

Nathaniel shrugged. "You could get more, but you don't want to. But, if you wanted to see Micah more often."

"I don't know why I'm complaining. I do see him at night. I mostly just…I'd like to wake up with him occasionally is all, really."

"Tell him that."

"What?"

"Tell him that you'd like to wake up with him." Nathaniel smiled. "He'd really like to know it, and he might be able to make it happen."


	4. Chapter 4

We went back down to our room, because, truthfully, the Circus is borign and dead during the day if no one is visiting. Also, we were both short a couple hours of sleep from Richard's phone call, and I could use the rest. I suspect Nathaniel was more intrested in the snuggling, but tha'ts all right with me.

I like cozy. Some people find it hard to believe from a bondage zombie queen, but one of the reasons Richard and I worked, back when we did work, was that desire to have coziness together: watching old musicals, lying around in t-shirts and sweats, eating peanutbutter out of jars. Comfortable and close.

The wereanimals like snuggling, most of them, but not too many are good with coziness. There's a difference between hanging out and a puppypile, and Micah and I are slowly teaching it to Nathaniel.

When we got to the room though, there was a surprise. "Damien, you're…,er, up?" I said.

He nodded, emerald eyes shimmering with tears. "Yes, mistress."

Oh, boy. Damien was one of the few vampires I knew who hated the idea of daywalking, of being up and mobile while the sun shone. It didn't help matters that his closest friend had been burned to ash in front of him by she who made both of them, and then She had stoked Damien's fear and fed on it. And when Damien got stuck in a situation he didn't like, he got very correct and formal.

And even more than I, Damien could feel the sun, even thirty or forty feet below ground.

I held out my arms to him, brought him to me. On the one hand, I hated for Damien to suffer this way. On the other, Damien's daywalking seemed to be directly related to my personal power. When I had juice to spare, Damien stayed awake during the day. So, I was cheered by this evidence that I was correctly managing all of my hungers.

Damien folded himself around me, and I felt the terror that he kept leashed, hidden beneath a self-deceptive mask of calm. I didn't know what to do for him.

Okay, that was a total lie. I knew something I could do for him, knew that sex would make him feel better. (Or, perhaps more accurately, I could make him feel better with sex.) And I would do it, too. It did make me upset that so often it seemed that sex was the only way I had of making the men around me feel better. It's not even that it's so goddamn embarrassing. I also hate that, sometimes, sometimes, I think they think of me just as a cunt or a killer. That is so goddamn frustrating.

Or it would be frustrating, normally, but Damien gives me the calm so I can think these things without getting emotionally wrought up. Instead of letting my anger wash through me, and pushing away everyone I loved, everyone who wanted me, I pulled Damien into the bedroom, and gently pushed him to the bed.

"Leave the light off, Nathaniel," I said. "We don't need it."

"Can I stay?" he asked. His voice was tentative, but happy. Nathaniel genuinely _likes_ sharing me with other men, he prefers it really. In some ways, he really is meant for me.

"Damien, it's up to you." I crawled on the bed, an enormous California king monstrosity, and reached out to find my vampire servant on the bed. I found his ankle, and worked my way up. He'd already stripped, and, I think, had fed well that night. His skin was warm, the marble smoothness of his flesh yielding to the pressure of my fingers.

"As my mistress commands," he said.

I rolled my eyes, because this was supposed to be for his benefit. "Your mistress commands you to make a choice, Damien." I wrapped myself around him, my back to his front. "Relax, and tell me if you want Nathaniel to come to bed with us or no. That's all. There's no trick. I won't hurt you. Answer as you feel." I opened up the marks between us to reinforce my order, to have him see that what I desired was for him to make his desires known.

And through the marks, he let me know that things felt more complete, felt safer when Nathaniel was with him, that he counted on Nathaniel to speak for his desires even when he could not voice them himself.

And Nathaniel came on the bed at that point, crawled up and placed himself chest to chest with Damien, which startled me. They're both pretty insistently heterosexual, although they've been known to do what was necessary to get through the night.

"Have you two…?" I didn't know what verb I wanted, so I left the notion over.

Nathaniel half-rose and, over Damien's shoulder, he nuzzled at me. "We've been working together, working on …being stronger together. You gave us things, Anita, things we should know how to use."


	5. Chapter 5

I touched Damien's back. Touched is the wrong word. I stroked it, sweet and slow. He was tight, tense all the way through. I wanted to warm him up a bit. "Are you still thirsty?" I asked.

He shook his head, said, "I fed tonight. I'm fine."

"Nathaniel likes to be bitten," I said. "So do I. It's okay if you want some."

He rolled onto his back then, turned to face me. We couldn't see each other, really, though. We were still working from the light from the bathroom, and it was dark enough that we could only make out the vague outlines of one another, not really see features. Definitely couldn't see color.

I could feel his warmth though. He probably was full, but I wanted him to relax, to stop thinking about the sun. And most vampires can be distracted just by the thought of blood.

"Really, mistress, I am fine. I…I could use your warmth." His voice was hesitant, soft.

I lay myself down on him, pulled him close against me. It was even harder to get Damian to ask for things than it was to get Nathaniel to do so. The problem with Nathaniel was that he didn't want to ask, he wanted to be told what to do (although, of course, he wanted to be told the _right_ things, the properly painful or submissive things.) Damian, on the other hand, feared having desires or voicing them, and so he tried not to want anything, tried to keep anything like a want or a need locked away in the secret heart of him.

I have the key to him, there, but I won't rip his secrets from him. I do not want to be the tyrant that She Who Made Him was, for one thing. And for another, I need all who are around me to have strength in their own right. So, instead of stealing his needs out of him, I simply give him what he wants, whenever I can figure out what that might be.

And I give him affection, petting him, cossetting him as much as he'll let me. Now, I kissed him. I pushed my warm breath into his mouth, let it inflate his lungs. His fangs descended, and he tried to pull away, but I wouldn't let him. Between Jean Claude and Asher, I have plenty of experience in kissing with fangs. Besides, I don't mind if I get nicked a little bit. I've gotten used to the taste of blood. I won't say I liek it exactly, but it's very familiar to me now.

As I wrapped my arms around Damian, I felt Nathaniel behind him, pressing his body up against Damian's. I waited for Damian to object, but he didn't. I guess they'd really been working together, were really comfortable, because Damian had reacted badly to sharing a bed with Micah the one time we'd tried that.

I still didn't know what we were going to do here, so I figured I would ask the one I wanted to make that decision. "So, Damian? What do you want to do right now?"

He said, "I want to drink you."

"I thought you didn't want blood?"

He turned and pressed his face into my neck. "Lower, lady."


	6. Chapter 6

Damian licked at my tongue, the insides of my cheeks, tasting me. I was passive for him, still, let him take whatever he wanted. It was a twisted irony of the universe, that Damian's chill reserve, the calm he leant me, meant he was the only one of my men who got me still and waiting without a struggle for dominance.

I got dizzy after a little while, though, since I was basically rebreathing my own air. Damian had mostly other vampires for lovers, and I had noticed that he just didn't bother to breathe while making love, couldn't be bothered to take notice. I pulled back and said, "That wasn't the mouth you asked for, Damian."

"If you would permit, I'd like to take my time."

"Of course," I said. "Whatever you want."

And so Damian took a slow, slow journey on my body. He suckled at my pulse points, pulling at my arteries, the carotid, the femoral, some of the others that don't come to the surface, he licked at anyway.

"Take a taste, if you want," I said.

"What would Jean Claude do, if I did?" he said, slowly, consideringly, as if he wanted to, he just wasn't sure if it was appropriate.

"I would protect you," I said. "You are mine, and he—."

"He is your master, lady," said Damian. "But I thank you for the offer."

Suddenly, I felt skin and bone surge between us, smelled the sweetness of Nathaniel. "Jean Claude has no claim on me," he said. "And I have been told I taste—," he broke off with a gasp. "Hurts," he crooned, "hurts," and sounded glad of it.

Damian would have had to see Nathaniel's eyes in order to roll him, but Nathaniel is a masochist, so the pain is an acceptable alternative to pleasure.

I rolled on to my side, and felt for Damian's body, for his cock. It was warm and hard and smooth, and I regretted that I had missed him when he was soft and I could have swallowed the whole of him. But for now, I would take him in my hand and stroke him, let my nails slip along the length of him while he fed. I brought my mouth down to his chest, and did my own suckling, first one nipple then the other, till they were hard dots in my mouth. I was startled when I felt a hand brush down over my hair. It was Nathaniel. Damian had released him, and he tugged at my hair, pulling me up.

I realized suddenly that he was pulling me up to Damian's mouth, so we could kiss, so I could taste his blood on Damian's teeth. It was intimate, and violent, and perfect, and I chased the last few drops of Nathaniel from Damian's mouth and swallowed them.

"Now, I'm ready," said Damian. He rolled me over to my back, and licked a line straight down, throat to belly to clit, and he dug in with his tongue under the hood off the bat.

"Oh," I said. "Not…too much, it's too much to start."

He pulled back and went lower down, mouth to my opening, to the wetness flooding from between my legs.

Suddenly, I felt something over my head, and then my arms were restrained, weighted down, but not held. "Open up, Anita," said Nathaniel, and he brushed his cock across my mouth, my lips, painting them with the kinkiest lipgloss in the world.


	7. Chapter 7

I felt Nathaniel warm and heavy on my lips, and opened up for him. He slid in deep right away, hitting the back of my throat, choking me a little, panicking me a little. I bit him, not gently, and that made him roll forward deeper. I pulled my head back, not very far, as I was propped up by pillows, and bit him again.

He got the message that time and pulled back, back and out of my mouth, crouched over me, still holding his weight off of me. He put his hands on my face and brought his mouth close to mine. "Are you okay?" he said. "I'm so sorry."

I was coughing too hard to talk, hacking and spitting. "I'm okay," I said. "Just, don't do that again, Nathaniel. I didn't like it."

At that, Nathaniel dropped, bringing his head beneath mine, his body covering me. "I'm sorry, Anita," he said, soft little boy voice that said he knew he'd fucked up pretty bad.

"Get off my arms, they're going numb," I said.

"Shit," he said, and rolled sideways.

Damian had stopped going down on me somewhere in the middle of my coughing fit, and now he said, "What happened?"

"Nathaniel got a little too excited down my throat."

I felt Nathaniel tremble next to me, I couldn't tell what from, whether it was excitement or fear. At least, I couldn't tell just from his trembling. I lowered my shields, just a bit, and I could feel that it was both, plus disgust and a weird sort of awe. I guess he could feel that I was in his mind, because he turned to me and whispered in my shoulder, "It's been ten years since I forgot what I was doing during sex. You did that to me, Anita."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I just ran my hand down his back, tried to let him know I wasn't mad.

Damian said, "Did he kill the mood?"

I considered. I really did feel bad, bruised in my throat. "I'm not ready to go anymore, no. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, Damian," said Nathaniel.

"If," Damian cleared his throat, "if I may be so bold, there are other ways to comfort a man than to bring him to crisis."

"Huh?" Sometimes my eloquence astounds even me, but that wasn't one of those times.

"I think he wants a hug," said Nathaniel.

"Ooooh." That was sort of a weird thought. I never thought about a vampire wanting a hug. But, then again, Damian was my human servant, and Jean Claude had told me that a servant and their master were drawn to each other, just by the nature of the bond. I certainly enjoyed touching Damian in a way I never had before. I'd never let myself feel that about Jean Claude, as his servant, but when I wasn't being pissed at Jean Claude, I was sexually attracted to him. I'd never asked, and Damian had never volunteered, but I always got the feeling that I wasn't really his _type_, that if it weren't for the circumstance of our compatible magics, he wouldn't have particularly wanted to sleep with me.

"I apologize for my forwa—"

"No! Don't go. I was just woolgathering. Come here," I said, and reached down to where I thought his shoulder was, and pulled him up towards me. "You can have a hug whenever you like, Damian. I—." I didn't finish the sentence, because I didn't think there was a word in English that conveyed precisely the feelings I had toward Damian. I wasn't in love with him, the way I was with Jean Claude or Micah, or even Nathaniel. I wasn't even sure I liked him, the way I did Jason, who was probably my closest friend these days. But Damian's happiness was now necessary to my own, and I wanted to be the one who made him happy.

And at the moment, when he came into my arms, I felt him relax, felt the very, very faint fear he'd been carrying like a bad perfume float away. "Stay with me awhile," I said. And I reached out to Nathaniel, not with my body but with my mind, and he came around the two of us and held us both tight with a lycanthrope's strength. "Stay with us, Damian."

"Okay," he said, and died in my arms. Which kind of broke the mood for me.


	8. Chapter 8

I didn't push him out of bed or freak out. I simply got up and got dressed. Anyway, I was running late to the office. Nathaniel and Damian had kept me in bed longer than i really intended, but I had called to let Betty(?) know. And to find out if Bert had scheduled any appointments for me before noon, which was the last appointment I knew about.

What I hadn't counted on was the zoo outside. Not a literal zoo, but about ten reporters, lying in wait, asking what I knew about Sylvie, and whether the outing was part of the Furry Coalition's plans to de-scarify shapeshifters, etc. etc.

I went back in the building, just to catch my breath. I'm not scared of much. I'm not even really scared of reporters. But the thing about them is, I'm not allowed to just shoot them. I don't have many tools for dealing with people who annoy me: violence and sarcasm are about it. And the thing about reporters is, it doesn't pay to be sarcastic with them. They take everything too literally.

So, I went inside to regroup, to think about how to deal with them. Ten weren't enough to justify calling for a bodyguard, not really. And going out of the public entrance was (a) embarrassing, and (b) likely to be ineffective. I couldn't imagine there weren't other reporters on that side, or at least stringers.

I considered, very briefly, calling in sick. But hiding from the reporters, that would be cowardice, and I don't do that. So, I just checked my hair, put on a smidgen of lipgloss, and headed out the door.

There were more reporters now. Probably the ones who had been at the public entrance had been called over. I stopped in front of them. They don't take well to being ignored, it just prompts them to follow you, to hunt you down.

"Look," I said. "The first I heard about this Sylvie person coming out or being outed is from you guys. I've told you before: if you want to know what the Coalition is doing, you should talk to Micah Callahan. Okay, boys and girls, that's all I've got to say about this right now. I've got to get going, I'm late for work."

As I walked towards my car, somebody shouted, "Why are you late?" and I kept going without missing a beat. Then somebody said, "Tell us what you think about outing people against their will, Anita."

I stopped, and turned around. "There's a lot to unpack there. Because the first thing we have to ask is, why is it necessary for people to be closeted if they have lycanthropy? It's true that lycanthropes have short tempers and the physical power to hurt other people. But I have a short temper, and I have a lot of guns, and nobody is trying to lock me up, or place a bounty on my head, or keep me away from their kids or their food or their medicine because of that.

"People are closeted about this disease because other people put them there. It's hard to live a normal life if other people know about you. So, I don't blame anyone who keeps quiet to the world at large. Your family needs to know. Anyone you live with needs to know, but it's nobody else's business in the world, to my way of thinking.

"Which means that outing another person is wrong. It's making someone else's life harder, and if it's someone who is trying to fit in with the rest of humanity, someone who isn't hurting people because of their disease, then the person doing the outing is the one causing the pain. And the person doing the outing needs to be stopped. If i can stop them, I will. And you can quote me on that."

I wasn't sure what Jean Claude was going to think of my little announcement, but I figured he could tell anyone who asked that I was speaking as the Nimir-Ra of the Blooddrinkers Clan, and not his human servant. But my work was done here. The vultures had gotten a juicy enough quote that they let me go to work in peace.

I got there and discovered my first client of the day was already in my office and had been waiting for me for half an hour.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Van Deusel," I started off. "I had a bit of a domestic emergency." My smile was present, very nearly friendly, but I hoped it wasn't inviting. The idea was to get her to have the idea I was willing to listen, not to get her started asking me questions. This was usually a harder line to draw with female clients than with male ones. Men do tend to think the universe revolves around them anyway. "Now, how can I help you?"

"I'm not sure if you can," she said.

I hate these. I'd much rather deal with lawyers who need testimony any day. Or children who need closure with their dead parents. Those are good, too. If I was lucky, she was just going to ask for someone old to be raised. Most people couldn't raise anyone dead more than a hundred years. I could. I could probably even do it with just slaughtering a cow.


	9. Chapter 9

"Mrs. Van Deusel," I said, "please tell me who or what you would like reanimated."

She looked at me, then looked away. Her brown eyes turned dreamy and distant. She said, "When I was a sophomore in high schoool, i was in love with a college man. Boy, really, although I thought he was a man at the time."

I didn't say anything or move a muscle. I thought it was vaguely creepy if she wanted me to raise her dead high school sweetheart, but maybe they'd had a fight just before he got hit by a drunk driver or something. I didn't understand what made her think this was so impossible. At the outside, the petite strawberry-blonde in front of me was sixty, and that was if she had the best plastic surgeon in Missouri at her beck and call. Anyone at Animators, Inc. could raise a forty-five year old corpse, even Larry. Most of my colleagues would be done for the night after a body that old, but they could do it.

"We went steady right up until my graduation from college, when I realized I didn't want to stay home for the rest of my life and take care of his family." She nodded to herself, sat up a little straighter, as if reaffirming the decision she had made, what, fifteen, twenty years ago.

I was confused, though. If she broke up with him, and wasn't distressed by it, then who did she want me to raise? There was no one in this story except her and her ex-boyfriend. "Did he pass away?" I asked.

"You know," she said, her focus returning slowly, centering on me, "I haven't the least idea. Our mothers were great friends, but when his father died, Mrs. Gestbach moved to a nursing home, and my mother lost track of the whole family." She cheered up. "We went to the same college and we've got a great alumni department. I believe they can find him, if you need him."

"Why would I need Mr. Gestbach? What would I need him for? I still don't know anything about your problem."

"I want you to raise the baby, of course."

Oh, that was so not good news. That was bad, bad, bad. I wanted no part of it. "What baby, Mrs. Van Deusel?"

"When I graduated from college, I was three months pregnant, and that was when I realized I didn't want to take care of Teddy's kids or his mother or his life. I wanted to be my own person, to have my own adventures. So, I had an abortion." She sat up a little straighter and looked me dead in the eye. "It was perfectly legal at the time."

I gaped at her. This was even worse than I had thought. I had, once or twice, gotten requests to raise children who died before their time, families that wanted, or rather, thought they wanted, zombies of their taken before their time offspring. But this was worse. If I understood her correctly, she wanted me to raise something that hadn't even been an infant. I wondered what material she had for me to raise. Did they give women whatever was the result of that surgery.

Mrs. Van Deusel turned faintly grey under my scrutiny, and I realized abruptly that she thought I was judging her for having an abortion. "Ma'am, I don't think I can help you. Did you talk to Bert about what you wanted? Did he explain to you what a zombie is?"

She sniffed and shook her head. "I talked to that…," the pause here made me wonder what she would have filled it with: horrible? obnoxious? rude?, "man for as short a time as possible."

"Well, I'm sorry to say that you've wasted your time and the consulting fee. Even though Bert is not an animator himself, he does have an understanding of the parameters of what we can accomplish, and he could have let you know that what you want is simply impossible."

"But you don't even know what I want!" said Mrs. Van Deusel.

"When I raise a person, they're going to remain at the same stage of development as they were at in life. Your," I hesitated, but she had already used the term, so I would, too, "baby is not going to grow up, or learn things, or get any smarter or more interesting. About all you could do would be to feed it raw meat and rock it a little." I shook my head. "Sometimes, when a child dies unexpectedly, I can help the parents or siblings have a last good-bye, where they get to say all the things they wanted to say, but didn't quite get around to. But in your case, I'm not sure there'd be enough, um, development of the baby for you to, uh…" I trailed off, because there was no tactful, therapist-speak way to say, 'not be covered in the ooze of its developing internal organs and run screaming into the hills', was there?

"Ms. Blake, you misunderstand me." She reached in her purse and pulled out a small Bible. "I don't want to raise the child, but I want to know if I made a mistake. If I killed a human being with a soul. I've been told that you can sense souls. I recently became a Catholic, but I'm just not sure about when the soul enters the body."

"Oh," I said. This was a new one on me. A vaguely creepy one, too. Couldn't she just be Catholic and believe, or be Episcopalian and let it go? That's what I did when the Pope excommunicated all animators. But, then I've always been a peculiar sort. "I can sense that a soul hasn't left a body, but once its gone, I don't—there's not a trail for me to follow, or some sign that someone _had_ a soul. I just assume that they did because they were living human beings." I shook my head. "I don't feel the souls of human beings, either. I can feel they're alive, but I've—." I stopped because what I was saying wasn't true. "I've felt living human bodies that had the souls removed. It was terrible, and not something I would experience again." I shook my head. "But, what I meant to say was, it's much too late for me to feel a soul from the remains of your baby. I still can't help you."

"What about someone else's baby?"

I frowned again. Mrs. Van Deusel was giving me a bit of a headache, and I really wished she would just go away. The questions she was asking were a little too fundamental for me to sleep well at night. Too fundamental in both senses of the word. "I don't understand what you're asking me."

"If I asked you to come see a woman who was pregnant, about as far along as I was when I had my abortion, would you be able to feel a sould inside her or not."

I shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know if, even if the child had one, the mother would mask it from me."


	10. Chapter 10

"Cant' you try?" she asked me, brown eyes wide and pleading and wrong, in a way I couldn't put my finger on.

I took a deep breath, and realized that she smelled like fear. Not her fear, but someone around her had been afraid, so afraid that the scent of it lingered for hours afterward. I hadn't even realized that a fear smell could stick around. I was only half-believing that I could detect such a thing.

But I could, and I did, and suddenly, the thing I wanted most in the world was for this woman to get out of my office and never come back. "I probably could, but I'm not going to. It's not something I want to know, personally. And if I find that fetuses don't have souls, what kind of crazies is that going to bring to my door? And if I find that they do have souls, are they going to make me run around and check every woman who wants to have an abortion in the state of Missouri? Or in the country? There are maybe three other people in the United States who can feel souls the way I do. And I don't know that they have a strong _enough_ sense of them that they would feel the soul of a child in its mother, even if I can." I shook my head decisively and stood up. "You're just a big old can of worms I'd rather not open. And for what you want, I'm pretty sure you don't have enough money to get anyone else to try."

She stood and looked at me. Her mask slipped a little, and I saw, for a split second, something that looked like rage. But I didn't really care, I just wanted her gone, so I ushered her out and told Mary to give me five minutes before sending in my next client. The next three were insurance lawyers. That's the bread and butter of our business, and I can pretty much deal with them in my sleep. Thank god.

///As I led Mr. Phillips, my last client of the day, to the door, we both jumped at an astonishingly loud growling noise. Mr. Phillips looked back and down at me, and I realized that the noise had been my stomach, and that I was hungry, starving in fact. And not just for food.

I smiled weakly at Mr. Phillips and waved goodbye without shaking hands. I keep a powerbar stashed in my desk, after Dr. Lillian gave me a little talking to about food. I ate that, and the one I keep in my purse, and felt a little more…human, for lack of a better term.

I stepped out, and told Mary to tell my first client of the evening that I was running a little late.

"But, Anita, you're going to be early at this rate," she protested. "You finished up with your clients early today."

I shook my head. "I've got to get something to eat before I keel over."

"Ah," she said.

Our office wasn't big on camaraderie. Being able to raise the dead makes most people something of an outcast, and most of us were, if not asocial loners, strange people who had little tolerance for the strangenesses of others. But we'd been invited to some chamber of commerce gathering about a month ago. Mary had been lecherously amused when I told her to buy two tickets on my behalf, then astonished when I showed up alone and had both dinners by myself. Since then, she respected whatever I had to say on the subject of my appetite


	11. Chapter 11

When I got to the outside of the building, the Cookie Monster was waiting for me in the parking lot. "Uh, what's this about?" My stomach tightened. My body, my lioness, was very, very glad to see him. And I was painfully aware that the ardeur had not been fed this morning, that Damian's death had interruped the sex.

But Haven, my blue-haired Rex, was big, big trouble, and I didn't really need any right now. So, I wasn't very welcoming, and I was a lot wary.

"Your leopard asked me to come by, make sure you were okay."

"Make sure I was okay?"

He grinned, but it wasn't a happy grin. More of a grimace, like when you're right about something and you wish you weren't. "You haven't seen the evening news."

"No, I was working." I looked around. "What did you drive in on?"

He shrugged, ran a hand through his bright blue hair. "Nathaniel dropped me off."

That didn't sound right. I backed up a step, brought my hand down to my hip.

He held up both hands, spread them wide. "Whoah, whoah, whoah, lady. I am not out to hurt or be hurt here. I didn't even really think you need protection, but your boy wanted to be certain."

"Certain about what? You tapdancing around the issue is just making me twitchy." I got my fingers around my gun where it was in a skirt pocket, and I pointed it at him through the fabric. "Nobody likes for me to be twitchy."

"Your Zane is in the hospital. A human hospital. Somebody ran over him with their Hummer. And it seemed pretty damn deliberate."

"Shit. I've got to call Micah."

Haven shook his head, had a twitch in his upper arm like he wanted to get my phone away from him. "No, you do not. Micah is with him, but the other latebreaking development of the evening is that someone has informed the Post-Gazette that you are a leopard queen."

"What?"

He backed up and patted the side of my Jeep. "We should get in, get you something to eat. And we shouldn't talk about this in public, you think?"

I jumped in the Jeep and opened the door for him, and then I peeled out of the parking lot going way too fast.

He let us go in silence for about fifteen minutes, and then he said, "There's a drive through about two blocks from here. You need to eat something, and you need to eat it now."

My stomach growled again to underline his point. I pulled into the drivethrough, silent until the garbled speaker voice asked to take my order. I got two burgers, a vanilla shake, and the plain curly fries. When I gave Haven a look, he shook his head and burped at me. He was just that kind of a classy guy. I pulled into the parking lot of a closed Lutheran church, and started to wolf down the food.

"The story is still at the 'allegations' and 'suspected' stage. Nothing's on the record, nothing's official, but Micah and Nathaniel are completely out, and they make you look guilty."

I glared at him. "Being furry is not a crime."

He grinned at me and tipped his hand from side to side. "In Chicago, the difference is a little more academic. You keep us mostly out of crime here in St. Louis, but other places…." He shrugged. "Like you said this morning, nobody wants to give you a job dealing with people if you've got the quote-unquote disease. Can't get a real job, gotta get a fake one."

That was more insight into anything other than being an asshole or killing people than I'd ever heard from Cookie in one go. I swallowed hard and said, "Instead of waiting on the mundanes to give us jobs, we build our own places to have jobs at. And get along better with the vamps, who have money, a lot of it legal."

He looked at me sideways, out of the corner of his eye. It was real deliberate, because he was facing me, so he had to turn away to do it. "Auggie's cleaning up his act in Chicago, going legit. Nobody on the street knows why, but I ahve my suspicions. What about you?"

I didn't answer him, just finished the last of my milkshake and turned the car back on. "I'm late for my first appointment."


	12. Chapter 12

I didn't go to the hospital. I didn't call Micah. I didn't run to the police.

I took Haven back to his place to fuck him.

It took him about fifteen minutes to realize where we were headed, and then he said, "Anita, what are you doing? I thought you were going to drop me at the Circus and go back to work."

"I haven't fed the _ardeur_ since I woke up," I said. "If I don't feed it now, I can't do my job, Damian could die, and we don't know what would happen to Nathaniel, but it's probably not good."

"That's not exactly the reception I was expecting," said Haven. "And you've told me we're going to fuck, but, honestly, lady, you look like you want to kick my ass."

"I try not to kill the messenger, at least when it's someone on my side." I didn't look at him though. I wasn't sure exactly what expression was on my face, and if he was skittish about this whole deal, I didn't want to throw him off completely.

"I'm not very good at getting it up when I think I'm about to get shot. I know some guys get rock hard in the middle of fights or whatever, but I've never been that way." He shrugged, I saw him out of the corner of my eye.

"Trust me, as long as you've got the blood to get hard, I can make you hard. It's part of the whole deal. Frankly, we won't be taking a long time, because I'm running late. We could have done this in the backseat, but sometimes this kind of sex gets messy."

There was silence from the other side of the Jeep for several seconds, then Haven asked, "Shouldn't sex always be messy?" His voice was slow and doubtful.

"Not messy like sweaty, which, yes, of course. Sometimes, not that often but sometimes, guys change when I fuck them. I've never done it with you, so I don't know how you'll react, okay."

"Ah," said Haven and wisely shut up for the rest of our trip.

I got there and followed him in.


	13. Chapter 13

I'd had Haven's address for a while, but I'd never actually been to his place. He lived in a condo in a nice part of town, just off the vampire district. The walls were blue, but a pretty sky blue, not the Cookie Monster blue of his hair. He also had normal decorations on the walls. (Well, sort of normal. A lion theme predominated: brass etching of a lion head on one wall, several glass figurines scattered on his shelves, and the hardwood floors were covered in thick rugs the color and texture of lion fur.) He had maple wood furniture, and the effect was a lot more welcoming and home-y than I would have expected from him.

"You finished inspecting the place, doll? I could give you the grand tour, but I think you need to get going, yeah."

I nodded at him, said, "Just take me to your bedroom, unless you want to do it on the couch."

"Nah," he said, "it's a nice couch."

It was, too, with maple arms and a tan leather covering, a couple of blue fuzzy pillows. He patted it and then strode out down the hallway, which had prints from the Lion King musical on the walls.

"There's being out," I said, "and then there's being," I gestured at the whole place, "this, whatever this is."

He glanced over his shoulder and smiled at me. "The bedroom's different. Just wait."

I walked in and flashed hard to childhood. There was Sesame Street memorabilia everywhere. The bedspread was a street and a road sign, the alarm clock was Oscar the Grouch's trashcan, the curtains had Big Bird and Snuffleupagus, and everywhere, on every surface, walls and closet door, and on the tops of the dresser, were Cookie Monsters.

"You got a name like Cookie Monster, everyone knows what to get you for Christmas or your birthday. You start collecting in self-defense."

I just gaped in astonishment. I liked penguins, everyone knew I liked penguins, but this was something else again. This was practically a shrine. "I take it back." I looked at him and smiled. "The lion thing, in comparison, is completely subtle."


	14. Chapter 14

Haven just laughed at me. It was a bad laugh, nervous and jittery more than joyful.

I sighed, because this seemed like it was going to be a bad fuck. "I, look, I know this isn't what you were expecting. Is there anything I can do to make it better?" I offered.

"Anything you can do like what?" He shrugged. "I thought you said your magic thing would take care of it being—of me being hard. Does it matter if it's good? I mean, drive-through sex is not exactly what I was looking for for my first time with you, but needs must and all that jazz." He grabbed the hem of his t-shirt and pulled it over his head.

"It's better for me if it's good for you. I mean, that's how I prefer sex in general," I hastened to explain. "When it's good for everyone who's there. But for feeding, the better the orgasm, the hotter everybody is, the more, uh, filling it is. So do you have a, a toy you like? Words you want me to say? What gets you really hot, really fast?"

He didn't say anything, but his eyes cut over sideways to the head of his bed. The headboard was a built in bookshelf, and on it there were some books, long thin ones, either kids' books or coffeetable books, I suspected, and seven or eight stuffed Sesame Street dolls, three of which were Cookie Monster.

I walked over and looked at the bed, trying to figure where jerk-off magazines might be stashed, where the lube and condoms were hidden. There wasn't a side table, and when I kicked under the bed, I didn't feel any hideaway boxes. I flipped the pillow and found nothing but the smiling face of the Count.

But then I realized that there was a drawer set _into_ the headboard and I pulled it open, reached in and found lube and condoms. Thankfully, both were an ordinary kind you might pick up in the drugstore. I'd half-feared he'd have special kid ones, like you can get bandages with cartoons on them.

As I stood up with the supplies, I saw something, something weird in the fur of one of the Cookie Monsters. I dropped the condoms on the bed, and picked up the doll.

Haven said, "No," and that was just enough warning before he came at me with shapeshifter speed.

I ducked and pulled my gun at the same time. "Calm the _fuck_ down," I said.

"Okay," he said, "Okay." His eyes were hooded and strange, and he wouldn't look directly at me. "I just don't like people touching my Sesame Street stuff. That's why it's all in my bedroom. It's private." He swallowed and said, "I'm just going to bend down and pick up Cookie Monster, put him back on my headboard." He waited a bit and said, "Is that okay?"

"Yeah. Just do it real slow, Haven. I do not like people leaping out at me when—," and that was the instant when I put everything together and figured out what exactly it was that I'd seen on the toy. "—when I grab their sex toys."

Haven went bright red, from his hairline to the tips of his fingers. "it's not what you think," he said.

"I think you're a lot kinkier than I thought you were, but that's all I'm thinking. You put up your doll, _slowly_, and I'll put away my gun, and we'll talk about how you want to use it for sex."

He jerked, as if I'd physically hit him with that last sentence, but he did what I said, bent over to pick up the doll, put it away in the headboard, all of it real slow and careful, with every move telegraphed in advance.

I put my gun away and sat down on the edge of a soft blue armchair that was sitting in the corner. "So, talk to me about what you like to do with your toys, Haven."

"I don't," he shook his head. "I do it alone, Anita, okay? it's not something I do with chicks, I don't go to conventions or trade pictures with freaks on the internet or write love letters to the stuffed animals I pretend are alive, okay? I just—." He sat down abruptly, heavily on the bed, facing me. "I got turned when I was 20, okay, my little gang of street hooligans got into it with the wrong biker gang, and I made it out of that shit alive. But I was not okay having people touch me, I felt like an animal, and not in a good way. I was a fucking mess. I was suicidal. Like, I shot myself and spent a month recovering and was planning on slitting my wrists next." He looked at me, a disgusted twist to his lips, a little bit of a snarl in his voice. "I wasn't the kind of guy to go see a shrink, but our Regina is—my old Regina was—well, she's in charge of us, but it's a lot more in a mom way than you, a lot less, 'Don't fuck with me because I'll kill you.' She wanted to teach me furry could be good, and I already had a thing for Sesame Street. She got me a bunch of Cookie Monster plush dolls, and she made carry them around a lot, she made me sleep with them. Not, like, sex, but just in bed with me while I slept. And I was still going through puberty. I'd hit my growth real late, my voice didn't change 'til I was seventeen, which was fucking embarrassing. Anyway, the dolls were around all the time, and I was guy, and I jerked off, and eventually used a doll to jerk off with, and I just liked the way it felt."

"Okay," I said. "So, it's just a texture thing, not a stuffed animal thing specifically?"

He shrugged. Considering is little speech about not being a pathetic loser on the Internet, I figured this meant that there _was_ a stuffed animal part of it, but, really? I didn't care. I don't think liking plush toys makes you a loser, and I didn't need to know Haven that well. Not yet, anyway. I didn't have time to handle whatever emotional minefields were hanging around, I just needed to get him off.

"So, do you want me to just get you hard with a Cookie Monster, or do you want me to jerk you off all the way with one? If you eat me first, that'll work for what I need."


	15. Chapter 15

He snorted and turned away from me, shoving his jeans off and tossing them in a hamper. "Look, I can have normal sex without my goddamn dolls. This arguing is not turning me on, if that's what you thought." The words were casual, tossed off, but I looked at the muscles bunching on his back, rendering the Sesame Street characters there jumpy and nervous.

I let the _ardeur_ loose a little, let it look into him and find out what he wanted. Tried to, anyway. My _ardeur_ couldn't get a clean read on him, which is unusual, because it's not dependent on someone knowing themselves or anything like that. They've just got to have a desire. But that was part of the problem, I think. Haven didn't have have _a_ desire, he had lots of them. Maybe being a lion suited him in more ways than one. Also, I wasn't looking at his eyes. It shouldn't have made a difference, but I think it probably did to me.

In any case, one of the many things I found he was looking for was softness, but softness being pushed on him, softness he couldn't say no to, because he couldn't say yes to it either.

So, I picked up one of those soft, furry Cookie Monster dolls and walked over to Haven, put my left hand on his ass, and rubbed the doll along his right ass cheek. I put my mouth on his shoulder blade, and I was practically nose to nose with a Snuffleupagus. "I'm not mocking you. I'm not afraid of this or disgusted by it." I moved the Cookie Monster, down his thigh and inward, trying to catch his balls with its softness. "You like it. I don't dislike it. So, let's play with it, Cookie. Let me make you feel good." And I licked Snuffleupagus and brought the Cookie Monster doll around his front and to his cock.

He turned around and picked me up.

I said, "Don't toss me on the bed. I'll land on my gun." I wasn't afraid the gun would go off or anything silly like that. But it was a big hunk of metal right under my hip, and I didn't want to deal with a bruise bigger than my hand all night. So he walked over to the bed, set me down, and sprawled all over it in his own right.

"Strip for me," he said.

"I don't do strip teases. I _dislike_ those."

He wrinkled his nose at me and heaved a grand fake sigh. "Ah, and here I thought you'd be secretly learning from your boyfriend the professional."

I shook my head and didn't even start to explain. Haven and I weren't really close enough to have that kind of discussion about my home life, not yet. I just took off my clothes, folded up the skirt and blouse and jacket neatly on a chair, draped the hose, bra, and panties on the back of it, and stuck my shoes under. "Where should I put this?" I asked, holding up the holstered gun.

"Nightstand's good for me if it's good for you."

"You gonna grab my gun?"

"Nah," he said, "I don't touch another man's—another _person_'s gun unless the bullets are flying and he can't shoot."

I nodded, and put my gun in the drawer, then hopped on the bed, crawled on top of Haven, crouching over his thighs. I looked at him, long, lean body with ink in primary colors dabbed here and there under the skin. He was beautiful, and I wanted him, right now.

I pick up the Cookie Monster toy from where Ie'd dropped it on the bed and say, "Tell me how to touch you with this."

He looks at me, and his face is hard to read, or there's too much to read on it: anger and longing and fear all mixed up with other things I don't recognize. He draws in a deep breath and then his face changes completely, the easygoing smirk he wears all the time, and I realize that's his mask, the face he gives when he doesn't want anyone to see what he's thinking or feeling.

I kind of want to call a halt to the proceedings right there, but I've got to feed the ardeur now, for one, and we, Haven and I, aren't close enough yet for me to call him on his bullshit. I just hope I haven't screwed us up forever, because he is the Rex to my Regina, and if Micah and Richard are any guide, we won't be through with each other for a long time, and it's gonna hurt if we do manage to pull apart.

So, when he takes his hand and drags it down his chest and belly, I take the doll and follow the path he's laid along his body. There's a little drag between the doll's fur and Haven's own body hair, and he, well, winces is too strong a word, but I can tell he doesn't like it much. So, I swish the doll out to the sides, away from the treasure trail. I can brush Cookie Monster along the outside of Haven's areolas, and I drift it slowly over his skin, and the tension iin his shoulders eases up.

I pull the doll down his sides, where he doesn't have any hair at all, and pat at his belly button. There's hair there, but when I keep the motion a pretty straight up and down, it doesn't catch. Haven makes a deep rumbling noise in his throat, and for a second, I don't recognize his purring. My leopards' purr is lighter, faster.

I lean back a little and say, "I don't want to send you to sleep. Tell me how to touch you with this."

His hand covers mine, and together we slip slowly down his thighs and across to his cock, pulling on the shaft millimeter by millimeter with the gentlest of tugs. I watch his blood catch and thicken his manhood, turn his cock dusty rose and solid, and I bend down to kiss it. I'm holding Haven with both hands, my empty left at the base of his cock as I suckle at the tip, and the Cookie Monster and I playing with his balls, rolling them gently in the plush fur, stroking them all around.

The sounds coming from Haven change, they're less purr and more moan, a whimpering demand for me to do something more, but I'm not at all clear on where I'm supposed to go from here. And then he reaches down and pulls me up by the shoulders, until I'm lying across him, and he pulls his mouth down on me, and we kiss.

My lioness surges to the front of me. She is desperate for him, she wants to swallow him down, scratch him up, she's practically ready to mount him. I am hot, ready, _wanting_ in a way I hadn't been a moment ago, and I let a little of that hunger bleed into my kiss.

I open my eyes and look at him, and his eyes have changed, a golden-brown that's practically fucking glowing, and he growls at me, a little.

It takes everything I have in me not to take a swipe at his head, not to wrestle him for control of the bed. That's what the Regina wants, a struggle to assure the fitness of her mate. I can see, in his eyes, those cat's eyes I haven't seen in his human face before, I see him gearing up to take me on, take me down. But, because the ardeur is reading him nice and clear, I know what he wants most clearly right now, and it's gentleness and sweetness and easy love-making. I've already pushed him with the doll, and I want to give him this.

So, I kiss him again, and I cling to him with my right arm, doll still clutched tight in my fingers, and rub my left hand along the side of his face. And it is soft and unbearably sweet between us, and I feel my heart surge up to do battle with my lioness, because I feel cherished and she feels angry and unsatisfied. And I don't know Haven well enough to be cherished by him, but I do know him well enough to know that going slow is working for him, making this good for him in a way the doll just couldn't touch.

He rolls us, just long enough to get condoms, and then he's back flat on his back, but with me held to the side in his arm. He's quick and careful and gets the condom on one handed, then he rolls me back over and rolls me onto him.

I grunt a little, because I'm hot and wet, but I'm not loose yet. And Haven's not a big guy, but he's not on the small side either. When Haven hears that, he gets a hand between us and slows my descent on his cock, stops gravity from pulling me down with four fingers and works my clit with his thumb. He kisses me again, slow and tender still, waiting for permission, to go deeper in my mouth instead of plundering and exploring like so many of the men I've been with.

I open up at both ends, and he comes inside, and his tongue comes in my mouth, not all the way, but inside of me. And he moves his hand and his dick is in me, too, not so long it bangs the cervix, but wide and full and good. He starts a very gentle wave motion with his hips and I ride him, meeting him not hard, but all the way, my pelvis pressed as flat against his as I can make it.

It is so, so hard to hold the lioness back, but she's pacing back and forth in that place inside me, watching for her moment, waiting until she smells blood. But she doesn't get it; this is the slowest, sweetest fuck of my entire life. I can stay here with Haven forever, touching him with my whole body, feeling his warmth, feeling his satisfaction.

But then my orgasm sneaks up on me, because one moment I'm with Haven, still rocking, still kissing, and the next I'm writhing around him. I just have the presence of mine to open the ardeur, and it's a good thing, too, as Haven comes right behind me. Our mouths have stayed locked together the whole time, but the convulsions when I come knock our teeth together, and I nick him, and the blood in my mouth sets my lioness off, and I run my beast through him.

The thing about this development is, I don't have time to process it at all, because Haven turns into an angry lion. An angry lion with enough control to not want to hurt me, but still, an angry lion.

I don't know what to do with him, sincerely. Because he's not moving, not attacking. Just one minute he was coming and I was coming and it was wonderful, and then the next he was bleeding and she was charging and he was changing, smooth twist from one body to the next body, a full-on lion, and I'm covered in that shapeshifter goop. And I can tell he's an angry lion because of the look in his eyes, but his claws are sheathed and his mouth is shut and I don't feel threatened, just sorry.

But I still want to get up and get my gun, because an angry shapeshifter is armed by default, and I don't like being naked and defenseless. "Can I move?" I say, and I do my best to keep my voice calm, but the afterglow hasn't yet departed and I'm still revved up from the sex and the shock of the change, right underneath me (inside me, a little bit of him, and didn't that feel fucking weird.)

He does his best to nod at me, but the head motion looks strange as hell in his big cat's body.

I roll off of him, gently, because even if he's too tough to hurt, weight on a joint in the wrong direction can still fucking hurt, and I don't want to do anything to trigger Haven, not when he's this weird, unshifterlike mix of rage and calm.

"Can you talk?"

He doesn't say anything, and I guess that's my answer. I wish, for the first time in a long time, that I were a telepath, but it's just not so. The _ardeur_ grants me a very particular form of empathy, and I can see into the minds of the dead, but living people are their own creatures.

"I'm going to take a shower and get dressed, get out of here, if that's okay?"

Haven blinks at me once, twice, and then he shifts _back_, which shocks the hell out of me, although it really shouldn't, since he's dominant enough to have taken over the local pride. "You can shower," he says.

"Is that—are you okay?" I don't play the girl too often, but something weird has happened, and it was triggered by sex, and chances are, I'm going to have sex with this man again. I need to know what went wrong, and if the wrongness is going to come back to bite me.

I glance at the clock and see that I'm running late for my appointments: the first zombie should be coming up just about now. But, fuck it, this is more important. If the client gets too damn riled up, I'll pay them a penalty out of my cut.

"It wasn't really what—why'd you flip me? Was that some sort of powerplay?"

I shrugged. I'd figured out that my relationship to my beasts was not the same as most shapeshifters to theirs. In some ways, Richard had warped my view of lycanthropy, made the understanding much too dissociative. In others, he'd been the best preparation a psuedo-pan-were could have hoped for really, and I was grateful. "I don't have control of my beasts, not exactly, not all the way."

He nodded. It was too common a knowledge among our allies, but it's not easy to put a cat back in a bag, once it's out.

"_I_ liked the way we had sex, I liked it very much, but she was, um, restless?"

"She?"

"My lioness. The beast inside me."

He gave me a look, leaned back on the pillow. The look said, _I guess you're one of **those**_.

"She wanted to play rougher, and when I tasted blood, she came forward. But it's too far forward, I can't change my shape, but if the beasts come far enough to the front, they physically nearly change my shape. It'll break me if it ever happens. So, I don't let it. I run my beast through the animal nearest me, and you were it."

"And this is going to happen with us every time, doll?" The look on his face was a sort of weary resignation. He looked tired, but also like he was expecting this.

"Not if it's more, uh, vigorous between us, I think."

"She likes it rougher, you mean."

I nodded, because that was the shortest way of putting it.

"I can do that," he said, and stretched, and rolled to a standing position.

I got up from the bed, too, but I said, "You don't want to do that, do you?"

He shrugged. "I'm plenty adaptable. You just tell me what we need, and I'll work something out."

My eyes went to the bright blue Cookie Monster on the bed. It was matted and damp now, and was probably going to dry stiff and sticky. It was covered in shapeshifter fluids now, rather than just come.

He rolled his eyes and said, "They make those for three year olds. It's machine-washable, don't worry about it."

I didn't say anything, but I walked around the bed and put my hand on his shoulder. "We don't have to do it hard every time. I think part of the problem is that I'm around leopards and wolves all the time. Once I spend more time around you, not fucking, I think my lioness will settle down some." I squeezed his bicep, brought my other hand up to move his elbow up and down. "Hey, if we can do something athletic even—you box?—we probably won't have the same issue again at all."

"I'm a lion, Anita. I'm going to have a whole fucking pride to get off with. I want to do it slow and sweet with someone, I'll find a woman who does that with enthusiam. Just, stop trying to make everything all right. Nothing's wrong, there's nothing for you to fix."

I nodded, pulled myself away from him and walked out of the room.

"Bathroom's second door on the left. Guest towels are under the sink."

I took a minute to be boggled that Haven would even have guest towels, and then I got a look at the bathroom and was a little less astonished. "This is a pretty nice place," I said. There was a separate shower (enormous) and sunken whirlpool tub, bidet, heated towel racks, and everything was beautiful, brass finish, polished within an an inch of its life, and sweepingly elegant. I almost wanted to redo my bathroom, and my tub is practically a fucking pool.

I got in the shower quickly, and washed as fast as I could. I didn't think there was any real reason for me to linger, and it was going to take me twenty minutes from here to get to the cemetary where I had my first appointment for the night.


	16. Chapter 16

I got to the Circus around two. The show was still going strong, but none of my guys were home yet. I wasn't surprised: Nathaniel and Damian were probably still working, and if Zane's situation wasn't cleaned up, Micah wouldn't have left him.

I went to Jean Claude's office ot call Micah. It was the only landline below stairs, and I didn't want use my cellphone to call right now. The press had somehow missed that I was living with Micah and Nathaniel, and until this outing thing was taken care of, I wanted to keep it that way.

"Jean Claude?" answered Micah. "Is Anita okay?"

"It's me," I said. "I'm trying to keep a low profile."

"What? Why?" asked MIcah.

"I've been told that there's allegations that I'm a shapeshifter in the newspaper, I don't want to do anything that might suggest I am."

"It would be a problem if people thought you were." Micah's voice was flat, but it wasn't empty. There was a bitterness there that I didn't think I'd ever heard before.

"It's a problem for me, in my job with the police and the FBI, if they think that I'm one of the monsters we're hunting, yes. I'm already super borderline with the zombie raising and the unexplained yet readily apparent sex magic."

"So, why did you call? If you're keeping a low profile." The hurt wasn't all the way gone, but one of the things I like about Micah is his ability focus on the problem at hand. I was pretty sure we'd come back to the issue of my being, well, not out, but willing to appear to be a shapeshifter later. But it would be _after_ the dust settled from this latest round of crazy.

"Zane is mine. Haven told me he was hurt. I need to know what happened and what's been done for him."

"Zane?" asked Micah. "Oh! yeah. Zane is fine. All the leopards are fine."

"I thought he had to go to the hospital."

"He got beat up pretty bad with a bunch of lead pipes about eight hours ago. Once I got the hospital to get rid of the goddamn ice and apply hotpacks, he got better pretty fast."

"If Zane is good, why aren't you home?" I sighed. "Not that you can't go out late, I just… you hadn't said anything before bed about going out tonight."

"Oh, I'm not out on the town, Anita. Not at all."


	17. Chapter 17

The sound in his voice is strange, unhappy. I don't like what I'm hearing. I'm afraid for what's happened to the people in my city. "What's wrong? Where are you?"

"I am in a police station. There have been…attacks. A couple of new hyenas were leaving Narcissus', when they were hit with a car. The snakes' bakery was bombed. Fortunately, the bomber was very bad at his hobby, and it didn't do more damage than to break a window, but still." He sighed and didn't continue.

"How do the attacks put you in the _police station_?"

"The bakers called me. I called Sylvie. The police wouldn't let her in. I was…tired. And hungry. I got loud. Combined with the eyes. I'm not in a cell, I'm in an interrogation room. But no one will give me a straight answer to the question of, am I under arrest."

"Fuck," I said. "Okay, is there somebody working the hotline right now, or were you it?"

"When I left, there were still two people available to help others. I have been out of the loop two hours."

"Okay, I'm going to call my lawyer, the one I have on personal retainer, to come and see you. This is not going to go down like this."

"Okay," he said. I could hear the exhaustion in his voice, the need for a little comfort.

"Do you want me to come to you?"

"You can't. It will jeopardize your standing with the police, will it not?"

I sighed, because he was right. And it was late enough that calling any members of RPIT would involve trading a real favor. And with things so precarious between me and Dolph right now, I didn't really feel like owing any favors to any of them, not if I could help it. "Do you want me to send one of the leopards? Noah, maybe? Or Cherry?"

"Cherry would be good."

"I'm sorry about this, Micah."

He sighed and said, "You didn't make me lose my temper."

I closed my eyes, took in a deep breath. That hadn't been what I meant, and he knew it. "I love you," I said. "Let me get started making all of these arrangements for you."

"I love you," he said, and hung up.

I sat back in Jean Claude's giant leather chair, more like an abbreviated throne than something for an office. I needed to, deep breaths, I needed to make a couple of phone calls, get Cherry and the lawyer to the station. That was all. Deep breaths, I could do it. There was nothing frightening here, just a telephone so I could help my lover.

Cherry first. That was a short call, since I could tell her what to do and she wouldn't argue back. The lawyer afterward, and he didn't argue much either, which is the benefit of a handsome retainer, I suppose.

Then I put the phone down, because Jean Claude and Asher were working, and Richard was not talking to me, and for someone who had a hell of a lot of guys she was sleeping with, my list of people I could call in the middle of the night for a hug was pretty damn short. I considered whether or not to call Ronnie, and decided against it. She was not enthusiastic about Micah or were stuff, and it was too late to call someone who didn't work or live mostly at night.

Shit. I did not want to sit here, with nothing to do and no one to talk to, because I couldn't afford for suspicion to fall on me about one more monstrous way of being. I liked to think that if I truly were a shapeshifter, I would have copped to it. But I wasn't, and what I was was something I don't think we wanted the mundanes to know anything about.

But not being able to be there for Micah hurt, too. It felt like I was abandoning him to danger and, worse, it felt like I was giving in to cowardice. I got up and left the room abruptly. I felt scared, which meant feeling mad, having my anger flare up. And Jean Claude hadn't done anything to me, and didn't deserve to have his room wrecked because I couldn't do anything for Micah right now.

I walked into the hallway and found Graham and Claudia standing on either side of the door. "Uh, what are you guys doing here?"

Graham shrugged his shoulders. "Rafael heard about the attacks, the newspaper report. He sent out bodyguards for you."

I shook my head. "I don't need—."

Claudia nodded hers. "Richard's set Sylvie up with people. The snakes were outed in the same article as you."

Shit. Micah hadn't said anything about that. Maybe he didn't know, or didn't think it was important. But it put a different perspective on things. "Okay," I said, giving in with a better grace than I knew I possessed.

Then I took a second look at them. Graham was wearing a black shirt, but Claudia's was red. "Um, Claudia? Did someone mention the red shirt thing to you?"

She shrugged. "If you've got bodyguards, at least one of us should be willing to take one for the team."

This was, wow, awkward. I mean, it had always been strange to know so many men were willing to have sex with me, should it become necessary, but it had never even occurred to me that Claudia might, too. There wasn't a really good way to ask if she was really a lesbian, or if I were special. I just had to pray that nothing ever came of the situation. Hell, I should probably just pray that no one attacked me for the time being. That no one else got hurt. I nodded and resolved to just ignore the situation until there was an emergency. (And, you know, ninety percent of my life works amazingly well, but I still hate that I can have genuine sex emergencies. It's completely embarrassing, as well as being unspeakably whorish.)


	18. Chapter 18

I woke up in bed when someone slid in behind me. When his arm came around, and I felt the cross-shaped burn scar on his forearm, I knew it was Jean Claude.

"Hello, ma petite," he said.

I turned around to face him. Well, not face to face exactly, my eyes were lined up with his chest, but close enough. "Hey," I said, and grabbed him a little closer. "You heard about the—?"

"The misfortune which has misfallen our allies, and the accusations levied against you? Yes. I also know that you have been sent bodyguards."

I shrugged. "It didn't seem like a stupid idea, so I kept them."

"I am glad to hear it, ma petite." He kissed me on the forehead, and I could feel him inside my head, inside my heart, checking me out. "There is a frustration and a sadness in you. Can I help you with it?"

"Micah's in jail. Well, he's at the police station. I don't think he's been arrested. I sent him a lawyer and Cherry, because she's out."

"And?" He rubbed a hand up and down my spine, firm enough to be soothing rather than ticklish or arousing.

"Are you managing me?" I asked, trying to pull back from him but not going anywhere. Damn vampiric strength.

He shrugged. "_Un petit peu. Tu en as besoin._"

"No. I do not."

He blinked at me slowly, and said, "Then let us say, I have a need to care for you, and further, I am close enough to do it."

"What is that supposed to mean?" I didn't want to get into a fight about how there was so little of me to go around. But, if I were being honest with myself, I did want to get into a fight, and this would do as well as any other.

"It means only that we are both very busy people, who owe bonds of friendship and love to many around us, which makes my time with you seem sometimes fleeting."

"Is that why you haven't ended my punishment?" I said. "You want to keep me to yourself."

I felt him still beside me. "I have never requested your fidelity. From the beginning, I have shared you with those who had an equal claim upon your heart. I have watced with nothing but good will when that number has grown, and, when you came to require more casual liaisons to feed the succubus which has possessed you, I encouraged you in these pursuits, for your own good." He let me go and rolled away from me, sat up in the bed. "I know it is your way, to provoke anger in those around you when you yourself are upset. And there are many—" he sighed. "I will take my own bed tonight. Nathaniel should return within the hour. Or Damian may be here, already, if you would prefer cold comfort tonight."

I blushed for shame at myself. Jean Claude had done any number of things for which I might consider him a bad man, or even a bad boyfriend, but jealous clinging was the exact opposite of any of them. I reached out to him, grabbed his wrist. "I'm sorry for being a bitch. You didn't deserve that."

He didn't come back, just sighed and said, "Will you only take comfort in a fight at the moment? I find I do not wish to argue with you."

I shrugged. "I'm not in the mood for sex. I don't know what else—."

He got up. "I will leave word that Nathaniel should come straight here when he arrives." Just before he reached the door he said, "Please believe this is not to hurt you, but I find that i am in need of comfort. I shall, I think, go to Asher, instead of my own room."

"Jean Claude," I said, and stopped.

"Yes."

I sat up and walked over to him, put a hand on his back. He had gone very still, that unbreathing, undead complete lack of movement that it takes a hundred years or so to master. "I don't want to drive you away."

"You find my company acceptable only for sex or argument. I have no desire to argue, and you none for sex." I felt him inhale under my fingers, two quick breaths in, and then he stopped.

"That's not true. I didn't say that I only want you for fighting or fucking. It is what we mostly do, but it's not all we are to one another." I put my other hand on his shoulder, and tugged a little. I couldn't turn him by brute force if he didn't want to go. "Come to bed. Hold me. Talk to me."

"Talk to you of what?" he asked, but he was already turning to me, already walking to the bed.

"Of shoes and ships and sailing wax," I said. "I don't care. It's not the words that are important. It's your arms. Your voice."

He sat on the bed, and I sat on his lap, which was something I usually hated, but which felt right, right at this minute. "I don't like it when you guys say I don't have enough time for you—," I put my hand over his mouth, to stop him speaking. I was pretty sure he wouldn't bite it, but I would let him get away with a small nip. "And part of the reason I don't like it is because I don't feel like I get enough time with each of you." I moved my hand and snuggled into his side, pressed my head to his collarbone. I couldn't hear a heartbeat, although he was quite warm. "I was saying to Nathaniel this morning that I don't see Micah enough. And I miss Asher. I'd like to get to know some of my other feeds better. I," I trailed off.

Jean Claude put his arms around me and hugged me tight, laid us both down on the bed. "There is only so much of you to go around. So much time on the clock, so many hours in the night. We know. It's hard, but we know. And we do not blame you."

"I think I blame me." I shrugged and pressed a kiss to his chest. "I make you guys do so much for me, to make my life work for me, and I don't know if I'm giving you, any of you, enough of what you need."

Jean Claude was very quiet for a moment, and then he said, hesitantly, "We don't expect more from you."

That was a whole world of not at all helpful, but, at the same time, he let his shields down to me a little more. And what I felt from him was contentment. Not satisfaction, satisfaction would say that he had all he wanted and not too much, and, clearly that was not the case between us. But he had enough of me, I could feel it. My presence made him more happy, more safe and secure feeling. My absence did not make him feel bad. He was not alone, for he had Asher, and he had his businesses and his city, and he did not have to _fear_ for me in my absence. Yes, he was content.

And feeling his contentment, something unwound in the center of my chest, a knot I hadn't known I'd been holding onto let go. "Stay with me until I fall asleep? No, until you have to go…." I cupped his cheek with my hand and kissed him, deeply, lovingly, but not passionately.

"I will stay with you until I must die," he said, without irony or archness, just devotion.

I felt cherished, comforted, and I fell asleep wrapped around Jean Claude, loving him more in that moment than perhaps I ever had, and missing Nathaniel and Micah something fierce.

The next morning, I woke up with Nathaniel and Micah wrapped around me, and Jean Claude was gone. My two leopards were sleeping hard, Micah drooling into my hair and Nathaniel's body heavy on my left arm and leg. I lay there, warm and a little sweaty, and waited for one or both of them to wake up. They took long enough that I had entered a meditative doze; I was startled when Nathaniel rolled. He blinked his lovely purple eyes at me and said, "Good morning, Anita."

"Good morning, Nathaniel," I said. "When did Micah get in?"

"Micah got in at five-thirty," said Micah. "And Micah is staying in until at least 10:30. Go away." He buried his head more deeply in the nape of my neck and curled his body more tightly around mine.

"Let go first," I said.

"Here," said Nathaniel, and he pried Micah's arm away from my body so I could roll away.

Micah made a disgruntled, grumbly snuffling noise and rolled away from the both of us, pulled the covers up over his head.

Nathaniel and I looked at each other, and then I looked away because otherwise I would have burst into laughter. Micah was never anything like this, and the contrast from his usual behavior was pretty hilarious. The two of us pulled on robes and slipped out of the room as quietly as possible, closed the door all the way, then burst into a laughing fit.

The two guards on the door, Bobby Lee, a rat I know and like, and a new guy I didn't recognize, looked at us, rolling around on the floor, then looked at each other and shook their heads. Bobby Lee said, "They got about five minutes, and then we'll find a witch or somebody to make sure this ain't supernatural. Knife, bullet, and claw are just some of the things we've got to protect Anita from."

I shook my head at him and tried to take some deep breaths. My voice was still shaky with held back laughter, but I managed to say, "Micah. Grumpy. Cute." Which set Nathaniel off and made me start up again, but I saw something settle down in Bobby Lee's face and was glad I'd made the effort.

I went up to the kitchen, still giggling, but with a sudden realization that I was starving. I am not a shapeshifter, no matter how many strains of lycanthropy I carry, but I do feel the moon's call. We were four days away from the full moon, and I was suddenly craving meat this morning. By the time I'd pulled a couple of steaks out of the refrigerator Nathaniel had had Jean Claude set up for us, my laughter had settled down enough for me to turn and look at Nathaniel. "You want anything to go with steak, or you just want two steaks?"

Nathaniel pursed his lips together and came to look into the refrigerator, over my shoulder, saying, "You tell me. I'll cook breakfast, because I want something that's worth eating."

"I was just going to get the steaks hot. It's hard to ruin hot." But I stepped back, because Nathaniel's cooking was worlds away better than mine, and he liked doing it, besides. "I'm going to get the newspaper. I want to see what the next unfortunate bombshell is."

"Okay," said Nathaniel, and I could tell from the way he spoke that he wasn't listening to me. "I think I'll just roast some vegetables to go with, peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes. Hey, you want breakfast fajitas?"

"Nah," I said, walking out of the room. "You'd have to cook the steak so there weren't any juices dripping, or it would be too messy."

"And that would be way too done, you're right."


	19. Chapter 19

The paper screamed at me, "Human woman shot with silver. Tests negative for lycanthropy." I skimmed the article, and found that the woman had been identified as a lycanthrope in the newspaper two days ago (two days ago? before Sylvie?), and that she was a dental assistant until she had been fired yesterday. She was survived by both parents and a kid sister. RPIT was not consulting, as the victim was not preternatural, and there was no evidence that the assailant was either.

Fuck, that was not the next thing I wanted to see. Also, I was confused. I hadn't been reading the paper myself (if I want news, I can listen to public radio or watch TV), just having people tell me so-and-so was outed. Had I been missing people who weren't in the life being identified as shifters? Were witches or other clairvoyants being outed, too? How the hell _had_ this whole mess started, anyway? I needed some answers.

Unfortunately for him, I only knew one guy in the newspaper business. And that guy had to be in fear of being outed himself. I called my old friend Irving, who was also a rat shapeshifter, and told him to meet me at Dead Dave's in an hour.

I went back inside, showered and dressed really quickly. (I ignored Micah's yowls when the lights came on and threw a blanket over his head.) Then I raced upstairs and gobbled my food, kissed Micah goodbye, and was on my way to Dead Dave's. Claudia was in the car with me, and Bobby was following us in an ugly orange SUV.

We got to Dead Dave's a couple of minutes late, and I nodded to the daytime bartender but headed for the back room Irving and I had used before when we wanted people to know Irving was using me as a source, but we didn't want them to know what we were saying.

I got in the room and waved a hand at Irving before he had the chance to say anything. I took out the knife I had in my side pocket (that one was totally street legal, the blade on my back, not so much, but somebody had brought the guns out, and I wasn't nearly as confident as the cops that the responsible party wasn't preternatural), sliced my finger, and sprinkled a little blood in the four corners of the room, then splashed it straight under my feet, and once up in the air. Then I thought about a thick, concrete bunker, which kept all the energy out, and I thought about an EM pulse that would take out any bugs. And once I was pretty darn sure no one was spying on us, I sat down in a ratty leather chair across a scarred wooden table from Irving and said, "Hello."

"Since when do you do magic?" asked Irving.

"Raising the dead isn't magic? 'Cause I've been doing that since I was fourteen." I raised one eyebrow and gave him a very thin lip.

Irving waved his hand, like he was wiping away my objection. "You haven't been doing _ritual_ magic all that time."

"You remember that witch I met in Tennessee? She's been teaching me some things that are useful in a more general sense than just with zombies or for tearing about monsters."

Irving frowned at me. "So, what was that a ritual _for_? That didn't look like the reverse of "Strength in Arms" or "Subtlety and Wisdom"?"

I mouthed the words Irving had said, but I didn't repeat them. I shoook my head. "No, that was just to make sure no one was listening."

Irving sighed and put his head on the table. "What the hell are you into, Anita, that you're worried about spying?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, Irving. I know that it's not just me." I showed him the paper. "If she'd been in a shpae shifter, it would ahve been just as much my fault as this poor woman's death is mine."

Irving brought his head back up to look at me, eyes wide. "How is this _your_ fault? Have you been leaking name s to someone in the news?"

I rolled my eyes at him. "Of course not. But I said I would take down the talker, and if whoever did this hurt this woman because she knew something…." I shrugged again.

"Or they hurt her because they thought she was one of us." He looked at the paper, printed the artist's rendinering of the woman in question. "I think she was the first one to be outed. She was the first one I saw."

"You didn't tell anybody?"

"I didn't know her. I didn't recognize her. I figured somoene from her group would take care of it."

"Well, I'm a human being, and I'm going to take care of it." My voice sounded cold and serious as I said the words.

Irving shivered a little and said, "Well what do you want to know that I can tell you? That's not my story, it's not my paper."

"Have you heard about anyone shopping this around? Don't you newspaper guys kind of have an idea of what each other are up to? Aren't you paying attention to the competition?''

Irving shook his head, then nodded it, then shrugged. "Normally, yes, we keep pretty close tabs on each other. But when the Sun came out, everybody in local news was shocked. And not only were we shocked, we couldn't confirm. On the first one, apparently we couldn't confirm because the story was a lie. With you and Sylvie, no shifters would talk to us after what you said at the Circus."

I smiled, or at least I showed him my teeth. "Can you get me to see the person who wrote the story? Maybe I can talk to them, get them to stop running it until whoever killed the woman is caught."

Irving grimaced and hunched in on himself a little. "You could call up Clarise Darlow and get an interview in a minute. She'd love to follow up with someone's she outed, or at least her editor would love it if she did. But you can't appeal to her better nature or her fellowship with her fellow man. The _only_ ethics Clarise has are journalistic ones. Otherwise, she's a complete raging bitch."

"Can I scare her into stopping?"

"Probably not. And she'd probably just write in the paper that you threatened her if you tried it. She won't give you her source without you using some sort of magical mojo on her, and if you do that, she'll go to the cops and try to get a Pullitzer out of it."

"Well, hell, Irving, what am I supposed to do? Can I go over her head, to her editor? What if I offer him better outings, or better interviews? I can get him an interview with the head of the local pard and the local pride for sure, and I could maybe talk Jean Claude into an interview."

Irving shook his head, regretfully. "Her editor would go for it a hearbeat, but she'd just put the outings on her blog. She really believes that information wants to be free. She believes it like it's her religion, Anita."


	20. Chapter 20

I called Ronnie. She didn't pick up her cell, but that wasn't unusual if she was in the middle of a case. "Ronnie," I told her voice mail, "I need you to follow a journalist. I need you to find out who she knows in the shapeshifter community. Or possibly the medical community. Someone is feeding her info on people who aren't out, and I have to put a stop to it. People are getting hurt."

The thing I couldn't figure though, was the human woman. Was this journalist woman just getting bad information? And then I realized that I had thought, "She's not a shapeshifter," but all the newspaper had said was, "She tested negative for lycanthropy." There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to get the ability to exchange a human form for an animal one. The swans did not have lycanthropy, and that time when Marcus hired me to find out who was hunting shapeshifters, I'd been dealing with a curse victim on one hand, and a witch on the other.

The newspaper had said that RPIT wasn't taking the case, but if RPIT didn't think that supernatural abilities were a factor, they'd sometimes let Homicide investigate the death of a less important vampire or the domestic killing of a human by their lycanthrope spouse. RPIT was a taskforce, and now that Dolph had whipped them into an asset instead of a joke, the St. Louis PD treated them as such. Still wasn't good enough, in my opinion, but it was better than nothing.

But speaking of ill treatment, I had to approach this pretty carefully. Dolph and I were still on pretty damn shaky ground. His son wasn't going to become a vampire any time soon, but he viewed me as part of the problem, part of the mainstreaming and acceptance that made his son think that maybe possibly it was a good idea. Zerbrowski was usually on my side in things like this, but if Dolph had told him to keep me out of it, Zerbrowski would obey Dolph before he'd bend the rules for me. Which left only Detective Tammy.

Tammy wasn't quite yet on medical leave, her pregnancy wasn't that far advanced, but she had been getting, er, broody for lack of a better word, and she'd started staying on a desk whenever she could. Admittedly, that wasn't that damn often, since she was RPIT's primary magic user (hmm, what they were going to do when she went on maternity leave for real; they had a few sensitives but nobody nearly as trained as Tammy.)

I checked the clock. It was early, but not so early that Tammy would still be at home. Larry might be, though.

I decided to go to Tammy and Larry's home, see if the Detective endulged in pillowtalk. I know I brought my work home with me a little bit. I was willing to be she did the same.


	21. Chapter 21

There was no answer when I knocked at Larry's door, which wasn't that surprising. It was early. Larry wasn't due at the office for another four hours. It was entirely possible he was still asleep, since we were ten minutes from the office.

I pulled out my cellphone and called him. It went to voicemail after three rings, so I called him again. He picked up on the second ring. "There's not some sort of vampire emergency, is there? Because you convinced me about the execution work, I'm staying out of it."

"That's not it, Larry. Can you let me in?" I held up the cup in my hand, even though he probably wasn't looking out of his window. "I brought coffee."

"Hmmm." I heard him rolling around, and then two heavy thumps. "Give me ten minutes. You want me to take a shower before I see you."

"Hard night?"

"Chicken ran away after I cut off its head."

"And you didn't take a shower when you got home, Larry? That's gross." I shook my head. I'd tried to teach my apprentice well, but apparently I'd failed somewhere along the way.

"It was my fourth zombie of the night. By the time I got home, I was afraid I'd drown in the shower."

I shrugged. "Go. Clean. We'll wait."

"We?"

I sighed. "You'll see when you get down here."

He wasn't very surprised when he opened his door and saw Claudia standing next to me, Bobby behind us on the steps. "Is this about that woman who got killed?"

"Yeah," I said. "And the outing, and the three other attacks on lycanthropes and shapeshifters from yesterday."

He stepped back and let us enter, but he didn't invite us in, even though it was broad daylight. I was weirdly proud of him for that. As soon as I crossed the threshold, he held out his hand, and I plunked his tall skinny mint caramel macchiato in his hand. "I don't understand why you would do all of that to a poor, innocent coffee bean," I said gently, testing the waters. We hadn't talked much since the wedding, and I wasn't sure where I stood with any of my human friends lately.

"I was raised on chewy fruit snacks and colorful sugar water. If they didn't sweeten and flavor coffee, I'd get all of my caffeine from soda and energy drinks." Then he slurped his coffee noisily, just to underline the point.

I shuddered theatrically, and slipped my own, unsweetened, unmilked plain black coffee in return. "We got some danishes, too."

He looked at me funny. "You eat already?"

I frowned at him. "Yeah. Why?"

"Anita, all of Missouri has read about it. You can stop pretending you're not a shapeshifter. I know you need to eat a lot of protein."

I looked at him, shocked.

He sighed. "Look, I'm not stupid. You run hot all the time, now. You eat a lot more than you ever used to, a lot more meat, and when you don't, you're as cranky as you used to get when you're undercaffeinated. I don't know exactly when it happened, but it was sort of around the same time as when you picked up Micah." He shrugged. "I don't know if it was a choice or an accident, but I'm not that surprised. You're around preternaturals so much it seemed like you were destined to wind up a shifter or a vampire, and, on the whole, I think shifter is probably better for you."

"But I'm not," I said. "I'm not a shapeshifter."

"Is this about your job? Because, seriously, you are the highest-earner by far, and if Jamison couldn't get you thrown out for that time you were with Nathaniel in your office, he's certainly not going to do it for—."

"Larry, stop." I put up a hand, palm out. "Stop. Have I ever missed work for the moon, Larry? Hell, have I ever missed three days in a row when I wasn't in the hospital?"

"No," he said, slowly. "But if you're not a lycanthrope, you're something. Something extra, Anita. Not just an animator. Not just Jean Claude's human servant."

I didn't know what to do, didn't know what to say.

And then Larry rolled his eyes and turned his back on me, and I said, "Yes. You're right." I put a hand on his wrist, and pulled him back to look at me. "Yes, okay. I don't have a word for it, it's not like anybody's done this before." I wanted to reach down and touch my gun. I wasn't afraid of Larry. I wasn't even afraid of his reaction. I was just…nervous. I'd never tried to explain to anyone human what I was before. Never put this whole mess into words. "I carry multiple strains of the lycanthropy infections. Wolf, leopard, lion, and tiger. Maybe two different kinds of tiger."

He raised his eyebrow at that.

I shook my head. "That's not important. I don't shapeshift, okay. I have the raised temperature, I have some added strength and toughness. How much of that is this and how much is from Jean Claude, I don't know." I shrugged. "But I'm not sensitive to silver, and I don't change shape. My sense of smell isn't as good, and I don't—I'm not as pack-minded as some of the others."

Larry nodded thoughtfully. "Anything else?"

I scowled. "That's everything I'm willing to share, damnit."

He held up one hand and backed away from me, but he was smiling. "I just," he shrugged, "we were friends, I thought. But you haven't been around much, and I feel like you've cut me out of the loop, lately." He looked at me dead on, face serious for a minute. "I didn't want you to lie to me." Then he grinned. "You're pretty bad at it, anyway."

I shook my head at him, but I was smiling, too. "I've gotten better." I tilted my head towards his living room. "I actually did come by for a reason," I said.

"Well, I figured if you just wanted to bring me coffee and catch up on old times, you would have waited until I got in the office. This gonna be short or long?" He started shuffling towards his living room, headed straight for an ugly but comfortable looking armchair.

"Depends on whether or not your wife has told you anything."

He checked himself, turned around to look at me with narrow eyes. "She doesn't tell me stuff so I can tell it to you. She especially doesn't tell me stuff so people can get killed."

I put up my hands above my head. Slowly, careful not to spill any coffee. "I'm not looking to kill anyone."

He sat down, sipped at his coffee some more. "Really?"

"I'm not _planning_ to kill anyone. I just want to," I shrugged, "explain what is and isn't considered friendly behavior here." I sat down, gingerly, on an ancient futon which smelled pleasantly of lavender and chamomile.

Larry rolled his eyes. "You sound like a Godfather movie."

I shrugged. "There are promises I've made. I intend to keep them."

"Yeah, Dolph apparently blew his stack when he read your little newspaper quote yesterday."

"Oh, shit!" I said. I hadn't even thought about how the police would take that. Too many of the people who were giving me or mine trouble have just disappeared lately.

"Yeah," he said, smirking at me. "Maybe you shouldn't let reporters officially quote you making threats, Anita."

I shrugged. "Whatever fallout there is, I'll deal with it. But what I need to know is if the woman who died was a shapeshifter. And if she was, why did RPIT pass on the investigation."

He pursed his lips and looked intently at me, but then he relaxed and said, "Yes, she was a shapeshifter. Some sort of inherited rodent curse."

I made a face at that. That sounded terrible, even worse than the cursed swan I had once known.

"Yeah," said Larry, joining me in the face-making. "Anyway, her personality matched her animal. She had an abusive boyfriend. He hasn't been seen since her body was discovered. With no forced entry and a lot of rage…," he trailed off.

"They figure it's a domestic dispute gone bad." I snorted. "And I would, too, if it weren't for the silver bullets. You _can_ buy them now, but they're not cheap and they're not in _most_ gun stores. It's a special order, not a heat of the moment crime of passion thing."

"Yeah, well. You didn't hear it from me, but the life insurance the boyfriend had on her was quite large."

I frowned, shook my head. "If he'd done it for the money, wouldn't he have set it up to look a little less like he had done it. hell, wouldn't he have stuck around long enough to file a claim?" I drummed my fingers on the armrest. "This doesn't quite hang together."

I stood up. "Thanks, Larry. You want me to tell Bert you'll be in late?"

"No." He scrubbed one hand over his face and yawned. "I'm awake and washed now. I'll get breakfast and be in a little early." He stood up and approached me, then slowly and carefully wrapped one arm around me and gave me a man hug. "You should come around more often. Or at least talk to me at work. I realize I'm all grown up, now, but I've still got plenty to learn."

I squeezed back in a matching one-handed man hug. I would have used two, but I wasn't quite done with my coffee. "I'll try to be around more," I said.

Then my two bodyguards and I headed out. We went back to the coffeeshop, and, this time, in addition to the coffee, I picked up some Cherry Danishes. Ronnie had an unnatural addiction to those things, and she'd be much more amenable to my plan if I had stuffed her face first.

Not that I thought she'd be that hard to convince: I was going to pay her, and what I was asking was pretty ethically sound as reasons for private investigation go. But our friendship was currently under a lot of strain, and I just didn't feel like I should leave any advantage I might possibly have off the table.


	22. Chapter 22

Ronnie is my friend. She's one of my oldest friends. But lately we've been fighting about men and committment and love, and what that means to each of us. It's never been the same between us: Ronnie's always been casual in her affections and, most of the time she's known me, I've been celibate.

But now I have a goddamn harem (most of the men in it I love dearly, either being in love with them or as dear friends), and she's at a crisis point with her boyfriend, Louis, where he wants to get married, and she's not sure she does. She—hates is too strong a word I think. But she's damn jealous of the variety of lovers I have, and the fact that none of my guys would object to me sleeping with someone else if the situation came up. She doesn't know about the succubus thing. I haven't told any humans about the succubus thing directly. (I told Bert that I needed Nathaniel in the office in case I needed to fuck, one time, and I did end up having to have sex that day, but I think Bert still doesn't quite believe me.)

But the truth of the matter is, I envy her, too. I mean, if the succubus thing ended tomorrow, there's at least five guys I couldn't or wouldn't stop sleeping with, and several more I'd be sad to stop having sex with. But I do envy her the easiness of dealing with other people. When people ask who she's dating or who she's in love with, she can answer without a flowchart and a history lesson. And Louie may be fighting the ghost of Ronnie's ex-husband and her miserable mother in order to get Ronnie to marry him, but he doesn't have to fight any real, flesh-and-blood co-boyfriends for a little extra time with her.

There's a reason Ronnie and I have talked only a little bit more than Larry and I have talked, but I need her professionally to work with me. I just hope that she's willing to be professional with me, that the personal stuff won't get in the way. Or, at least, it's something we can work through.

I got to work and told Claudia and Bobby Lee to go to my office. They both gave me dirty looks, because you can't guard a body you're not standing next to, or at least one that's out of your vision, but I trust that Ronnie's not going to kill me, and I don't want an audience. I've had way too many humiliating personal scenes play out in front of bodyguards and extra boyfriends this past year, I'd really rather cut back on that.

I knocked on Ronnie's door and stuck my head in, after getting the all-clear from Mary. "You got a minute? I need you to look into something for me."

She raised her eyebrows and said, "This is a professional consultation?"

I walked in and shut the door behind you. "Yeah, I think this is going to be enough time I wouldn't feel right impinging on our friendship."

"What've you got?" she asked, and waved me toward the client chair in front of her desk.

"Well," I said, "you heard about the outing?"

"Yeah," she said. "About that." Her mouth was in a thin little line and her blue eyes were cold. Ronnie usually avoids looking like an ice princess, despite her Scandinavian good looks, but right now I could feel the brrr.

I shook my head. "That's not true. What the paper wrote is wrong."

She narrowed her eyes. "I've met Sylvie at your house. You don't have anything to do with Legal Aid."

I shook my head. "It's wrong about me. It's wrong about the woman who got killed." I hadn't really wanted to get into a preternatural biology slash magic lesson, but it looked like the messy personal stuff was going to have to be deal with first, and that was part of it. "Shapeshifting isn't synonymous with lycanthropy." I put the danish down and pushed it towards her. "That's for you." Then I traced a couple of overlapping circles on her desk. "This one on the right, that's lycanthropy. And it overlaps 99% with the one on the left, shapeshifting. Shapeshifting is 90% the same as lycanthropy, okay."

She opened the bag and made a little pleased _mmm_ sound. Then she looked at me and frowned. "I thought that if you got the lycanthropy virus, you became a were-something. Always. If you were exposed and you didn't change, that you meant you didn't have the virus." She shrugged. "Sometimes it doesn't transmit. _You_ told me that the cat and reptile ones were hard to catch."

I nodded. "Right. And, if I had a fancy spreadsheet chart, the lycanthropy would be overlapping the shapeshifting like 99.9999 a billion 9 percent. Because I actually only know of one confirmed case where the infected person has the virus and doesn't shapeshift or the rest of it."

Ronnie's a smart cookie. She swallowed her bite of danish and said, "We're friends, though, Anita. You didn't tell me about _that_ either. And, you know, we work out together, martial arts sometimes. Would you have stopped me trying to bandage something on you."

I shrugged. "You can only transmit the virus while you're in animal form, so probably not. It doesn't really matter."

She shook her head. "If you were a regular shapeshifter, I'd be pretty comfortable saying that, but you're not, Anita. You don't know when you can transmit, if you can transmit. And you don't know if you'd transmit your weird deal or regular were-whateverness. What's your animal, anyway?"

I looked at her for a second, shocked. I'd never thought about it, but she was right. We were definitely dealing with something strange with me, and we hadn't done any sort of testing to figure out when or if I could transmit. And I get often enough that I should probably have stuff in my chart. At the least, I need to get my chart changed so they know not to ice me down if I'm throwing a fever while I'm injured. And they need to know to take precautions against transmission, and they need to give me extra pain meds, and—. Shit. I'm not sure if I'm an idiot and an asshole, or if I'm just spoiled by being treated by Dr. Lillian.

"Anita?" asked Ronnie.

I shut my mouth and said, "You're right. I've been cruising along assuming I can't hurt people, and I don't _know_ that. I just, except for the ob/gyn stuff, I've mostly been seeing a wererat doctor, so I hadn't thought too hard about any of it." I shook my head. "I guess I might just let the coming out stand, get my medical records changed. It's not true, but it's true_er_ than listing myself as vanilla human." I paused. There'd been a question Ronnie asked. "Part of it is that I've got multiple strains. Leopard, wolf, lion, tiger. Maybe two kinds of tiger, I'm not sure about that."

"Yeah, you definitely should have said something to me about that, Anita. I don't want to get turned, but _if_ I did, I'd want to be a rat. We'd probably be okay if I was leopard or wolf, but last I heard, the rats and the lions and tigers don't get along well in this town."

I shook my head. "There's a new Rex. I'd clear things for you with him, and I think Rafael would be understanding. Louie's not that dominant. And we don't have a tiger clan, so as long as we kept you away from them, you'd be okay." Then I blinked and returned to reality. "Not that that makes what I did any better, Ronnie. I really am sorry. All I can say is, I haven't gotten a chance to take a breath and _think_ about what's going on around me too much, lately, and I stupidly assumed the same old rules applied to my weird, new situation. And, also, can I assume that you've worked things out with Louis, since you said 'we'?"

Ronnie nodded, and she smiled, and her whole face lit up. "Yeah, you can. We decided to get pre-engaged."

"What is that?"

"We're not making any wedding plans or anything like that, but we're planning to get engaged someday. And we haven't moved in together, but unless we explicitly make other plans, every night's a sleepover." She stuck out her hand and showed me a pretty gold band with two topaz pieces abutting each other. "And we got rings, but not engagement rings or wedding rings. They were only fifty bucks, but they had his and hers versions and they really feel nice. They feel right."

I took her hand and looked at the ring. I've never known exactly what I'm supposed to be looking for when someone shows me their engagement (or pre-engagement) ring, but I do know you're supposed to look, make at least one _ooh_ noise of appreciation, and then say, "Congratulatons!" I did all of that, but it didn't feel like enough, so I got up and went around the desk and gave her a hug. "I'm glad that you and Louie worked things out. You're really good together, and he makes you happy."

She hugged me back, pretty tight, and I felt lighter and more at ease around her than I had in a while. "I'm sorry I was such a bitch to Nathaniel. And about Jean Claude, actually."

"Really?" I asked. And then realized that was pretty rude and shook my head. "I mean, thank you about Nathaniel, but I think you owe him an apology, too. But, you're willing to cut me some slack about Jean Claude?"

Her smile faded away, and she moved back from me, then pulled up her right sleeve. There was a shiny new pink scar there. "I got into a fight with Louis the day after the full last month. He changed in front of me for the first time." She pulled her sleeve down. "He didn't do that. He startled me pretty bad, I backed up without looking and tripped and fell and cut myself on the coffee table. _He_ ran away when he felt himself starting to change, ran down to the basement and stayed there for about twelve hours, until he came up as a man again." She shrugged. "But I was pushing you towards Michah or Richard on the theory that they were safer than Jean Claude, and seeing Louis…," she trailed off.

"Yeah," I said. "I know." And I hugged her again, since she seemed pretty sad.


	23. Chapter 23

The transition from hugging a friend to asking someone to do a job for you is never graceful, and I managed it with my normal tactlessness. I just walked back around the desk and sat down, and looked at Ronnie without saying anything else comforting or warm.

She snorted, popped the last of her danish in her mouth, and said, "Well, you didn't come in here for cuddles, what did you want?"

"The newspaper stories, the ones outing people?"

"Yes," she said. "Aren't you friends with a reporter, couldn't he help you?"

I shook my head. "Already asked. Not much he can do. The reporter whose story this is is at a different paper."

"So, you want me to find out some dirt on the reporter, cross-blackmail her?" Ronnie raised one eye, a little skeptical.

"No," I said. "I don't know that she does anything to be blackmailed about. My reporter friend says that the only thing that matters to this woman is reporting, getting the truth out to people."

Ronnie nodded. "I know the type. Dedicated to her cause, can't see why anything else might be more important?"

"That's what he says. And he says I can't, um, use moral suasion to get her to stop either, she would just turn that into a bigger story."

"Moral suasion, Anita?" She made her thumb and forefinger into a gun, pointed it at me. "That's an interesting word for it."

I made a face but continued gamely on. "In any case, I figure that the best remedy is to find out who is feeding her information and use my reasoned moral arguments on them. And if they can't be persuaded, I can find out who she's planning to out next and at least give them the wherewithal to plan for it."

Ronnie steepled her hands together, rested her chin on them. "This is probably going to take a couple of weeks, unless she's meeting her snitch everyday. You know my fees? I'll give you the fifteen per cent buddies discount."

I shook my head. "Don't. We'll charge it to the Coalition, and I'll make a donation in the exact amount of your bill. I can deduct this investigation from my taxes and you get paid in full. It's a win for everyone."

Ronnie twirled a finger in the air. "Look at you. I take it you finally took your ill-gotten gains to an accountant, like I've been telling you for five years."

I shrugged. "I had to, with setting up house with Nathaniel and Micah, and starting the Coalition and everything. The money was a little too complicated for just an, 'I'm not broke. Are you?' discussion." Especially since Micah actually had been broke, but Ronnie didn't need to know that. It wasn't any of her business.

Ronnie just nodded and said, "Hey, even when it's just the two of you, sometimes you get an accountant involved."

"You and Irving got a joint bank account?" I asked, startled.

She shrugged. "A small one. We both direct deposit a little every month. It's the date fund, so we don't fight over the check in restaurants. And we can buy a joint present if we have a wedding or something to go to."

"Wow," I said. Ronnie was very cautious about mingling her money with a guy. Her ex had taken everything in the divorce, and she'd vowed never to leave herself in anything like such a vulnerable position again. "I think you guys really are going to be okay, Ronnie."

"I know," she said, and smiled at me, sunny and warm and heartfelt. "But, hey, give me whatever details you have on this reporter you want me to follow."

"Okay," I said.

I wasn't scheduled for a client between three and four, and I was on my way out the door to get something to eat when trouble walked in. Generally speaking, Zerbrowski is a sign of trouble because I see him when the police have bodies for me to see. And, these days, when RPIT has bodies for me to see, they're both really horrible and really strange. Your run of the mill preternatural criminal, they can handle.

Today, he was bad news because there were no bodies, or, at least, I hadn't gotten paged to a crime scene. And I could tell this wasn't a social call, because the look on his face was not the friendly jester's grin that was Zerbrowski's default appearance. He was solemn, and with the way his eyes shifted around, cataloguing the waiting room and its contents, I suspected he was nervous as well.

"Come in, Zerbrowski," I said, re-opening the door to my office. "Mary, don't let anybody interrupt, okay. This may take a while."

I waved Zerbrowski towards the client chair and went to sit behind my desk. I was worried. I'd never had the cops come to my office before, and while Zerbrowski wasn't the same as a couple of uniforms swinging by to take me downtown for a little discusion, it was new and I was wary. "How's Katie?" I asked, slowly, testing the waters to see if we were all friends here or if I had crossed the line sometime when I wasn't paying attention, if I was now a crook in Zerbrowski's eyes.

Zerbrowski waved one hand casually, dismissively. "Katie's fine. She wants you and Nathaniel to come over for dinner sometime."

"You know, we've never had you out to our place, and Nathaniel would love to have a dinner party. You could come, and I could invite my friend Ronnie and her boyfriend. And maybe Larry and Tammy, you think?"

He twitched a little and said, "Ah, I figure it's none of my business, so I haven't said anything to her, but, well," he scratched the back of his head nervously, gave a stupid little chuckle. "I kind of let Katie think that you and Jean Claude is more of a publicity thing than a relationship. And I've never had cause to mention Micah to her."

I blinked at him. I'd been coming out to people all day as not exactly a lycanthrope. I'd forgotten that there were other things people might not know about me just from casual observation. "Who did she think I was with at the wedding?"

Zerbrowski shrugged. "She didn't ask me."

It was good to know we were still friends, or at least friendly, but, "I don't hide my relationships from anyone. I don't trumpet them, but if she comes to the house, she's going to see all of us as us." I smiled tentatively at him. "Which is not to say we won't all have company manners." I put my hands under the desk, stroked the gun currently strapped to my left thigh. "Just let me know if she'd take the truth better from you or from me."

"Nathaniel," he said. "I'm pretty sure she likes Nathaniel the best of us." And then he sat up a little straighter and looked straight at me. "You know I'm not here to ask you over for dinner."

"I know," I said. "Look, if Dolph wants to tell me to not issue threats over the public airwaves, can you tell him I'm sorry? I wasn't—," I paused, trying to figure out how to explain that I was speaking to the furry and not the mundane, when Zerbrowski broke in.

"It's not about that. Or, it's about that pretty tangentially. We need your help, but we can't pay you." His mouth twisted up as he said, and he looked at the bridge of my nose instead of my eyes, as if I were a vampire.

"Oh," I said. Because I didn't _really_ need the money. Hell, Nathaniel and Micah between them made nearly enough money to keep us all in the style to which we'd become accustomed. But being paid meant being officially consulted, meant they could use my testimony in court (if we got that far), meant having access to crime scenes before the technicians and coroners. Not being paid meant someone up in the hierarchy had decided that I was too much one of _them_ to be trusted. "Where did that come from?"

"I'm not sure," said Zerbrowski, "but Dolph was plenty pissed about it." He looked me in the eye then. "And it's just these cases. Anything comes up that looks more," he worked his mouth, looking for a word, "more unusual, we'll call you in, same as normal."

"What cases? Oh," because I knew exactly what I'd be forbidden to work on, and why they wouldn't rank as unusual. "This is about the hate crimes against shapeshifters."

"Yeah." Zerbrowski leaned forward, put his hands on the edge of the desks. "We just figured it out, when your boyfriend was at four different hospital interviews yesterday." He waved his hand sharply. "Well, _we_ didn't figure anything, that was when the cops who'd been looking at a string of regular assaults kicked it up to RPIT, said they didn't know how to deal with stressed out shifters, and could we please talk to the guy with the freaky eyes in interview two."

"Four? Shit."

"You didn't know?" Zerbrowski raised an eyebrow.

"I was asleep when he got home. He was asleep when I left home." I licked my lips. "How many from before yesterday?"

Zerbrowski shrugged. "That's part of what we want your help with. We've identified ten more assaults on shapeshifters from the previous three weeks, and another four incidents with people who weren't still in the hospital when a detective went back for a followup interview. We need to talk to everybody again, find out who was lying about what, find out who knew their attacker and doesn't want to give us their name, that sort of thing."

"I don't know if—."

"Anita," he said, voice sharp and disapproving. "You've been outed. Stop pretending you aren't a very important person in the shapeshifter community because you aren't a shapeshifter. I understand being closeted. I had a buddy in the service who got drummed out for being gay. But it means when closeted people are targeted, we can't help because there's too much being hidden from us."

"I—." I took a deep breath. I had said to Ronnie that I wasn't going to keep this from the people who need to know, and the cops did need to know. "The story was wrong. I'm not a shapeshifter myself, but I am a carrier of lycanthropy. I've got ties to several of the communities, and I can probably get most of the people you want to talk to you to talk, because of my status in the community. Give me a list of names and their animal forms, if you have it."

"What the fuck is a carrier, Blake?"

"I'm the only one I've ever heard of. I don't know what it means exactly, but I suspect it has something to do with being an animator. There's a magical component to lycanthropy that we don't understand, but we do know that other kinds of magic can fight it."

Zerbrowski shook his head, faint amusement flickering across his mostly serious features. "Only you, Anita Blake, only you." He sat back in his chair again. "That's not the only thing I came by for, though."

"It's not?" I asked.

"You had a client yesterday, a Van Delen. We want to know what she wanted."

"She wanted me to raise a dead person for some closure, and I told her it wouldn't work." There was no animator-client privilege, and Mrs. Van Delen had creeped me out, but I didn't feel that it was my business to repeat about her ex-boyfriend and her abortion, not without a more definitive statement than, "We want to know."

Zerbrowski tilted his head at me. "You're the strongest animator in the country. What could she want raised that you couldn't?"

"I don't mind answering questions about raisings I do for court cases or for corporate clients, but I'm not comfortable with the personal ones. Why don't you tell me why you care, and I'll decide what's appropriate."

"We care, first of all, because her name's not Van Delt, it's Gloria Higgins. And second of all, we think she's part of the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve. They're like Humans First, but they focus on lycanthropes instead of the lively dead. They're trying to prove that the intermittently furry aren't really human beings, don't have souls that sort of thing."

"Oh, shit," I said. "She wanted to see if I could feel a human soul in a fetus. She spun me some song and dance about becoming a Catholic and having an abortion in her youth, but…." I grimaced. "I knew there was something wrong, but I just thought it was some weirdness from being a Catholic consulting an animator, and a Catholic who'd had an abortion. Now, I don't know what to think."

"I think," said Zerbrowski, "that you had better be careful. You're not the first animator that this group has tried to hire. But you are the only one who isn't missing."

"They're kidnapping animators?"

"Or killing them and disposing of the bodies very cleverly. We don't know why or how, but I came by to give you a warning. Don't be alone with her, and watch out for yourself."


	24. Chapter 24

Sophie touched my shoulder and she was caught. I pushed at her, not strong enough to knock her down, not a real wolf, but she wanted me now, she was inflamed by the ardeur, and she fell backwards, legs spread, and reached for me, pulled me with her, rolled on top of me and smashed her mouth to mine. The kiss was sloppy, the first touch a painful smack which she pulled back from but did not gentle, we were pushed together, pulled together by the lust I had raised in each of us, without meaning to, without wanting to, but now it was here, and I wanted her, wanted her as much as she wanted me.

She ripped off my shirt and I didn't care, ripped my bra, too, took my breast in her mouth and sucked, no teeth, which I missed. I cried out for it, said, "Harder, bit me, now!" and she did, she scraped down my breast with her teeth and pulled at the nipple and it hurt and I loved it. I reached for her shirt, a blouse, purple and silk and soft. I ripped open the buttons, but I left the shirt because it felt good against my fingers, it would feel good against her skin, it could be part of this, this crazy thing we were caught up in, the two of us. And I shoved my hands in the cups of her bra and put my hands on a woman's breast for the first time ever, and it was good, heavy and soft and malleable, like balls but weightier, firmer, less fragile, and so I squeezed gently at them and felt the nipples harden and poke into the palms of my hand, and I whimpered at the feel of it, so different and new and good.

I pulled at Sophie's hair, pulled her head back so I could kiss her again, so I could taste her, mouth wild and woodsy. She smelled like pack, like _lukoi_, like safety, and I felt a love for her, the love of sisters. But I'd never had a sister, and if I did, I would not have straddled her knee as I did Sylvie's, not ground my sex against her, hungry for friction, desperate for the touch of skin.

Sylvie pushed me from her, and I fought it, I pushed back at her, desperate to keep our bodies in contact and she laughed at me, a strangled, choking croak and said, "I need you naked, lie down, your pants." I ignored her until she leaned forward, leaned onto me, pushed me down with her body, with her teeth sunk into the pulse point just behind my ear. I stiffened at that, at first, then I writhed under her, thought I might go just from that, from the blazing red rightness of pain combined with wet, heat, and the soft sussuration of her panting in my ear, but I didn't. I spread my legs and pushed up, groin first.

Sylvie growled, "Fuck it!" and I felt a splash of wetness on my thigh, through the pants. I looked down to see she had changed one hand, wicked claws glinting at me. She went for my stomach, fast, shifter fast, I couldn't stop her from gutting me, sex was finally going to get me killed but I was wrong. She ripped away my pants, ripped the crotch out of them and left my legs covered, then bent and got my panties with her teeth.

I laughed to see her spit out the scrap of silver lace and I reached down myself, to get to her pants. Thank god there were no buttons or catches, I just pulled them down, sensible white cotton after them, and I put my hands between her legs, felt the moisture that had pooled there, covering her lips and mound and clit. I didn't know what I was doing, my fingers were fumbling and clumsy. I had touched myself before, but not recently, honestly, and the angle was all wrong. I felt as if I were working upside down and backwards.

Sylvie trapped my hand between her thighs, squeezed around me like a young girl with a pillow in the dark, and she laughed and said, "You've never done this before." She kissed my mouth, licked my lips, breathed into me, "I love virgins, I do." Then she opened her thighs and pushed me down, back against the dry, crinkling grass, and I could smell the gravedirt and it mixed strangely with the smell of women wet and ready and hot.

And then Sylvie licked her way down my body, a line of wetness going from throat to belly to cunt, and she sucked my clit in her mouth, sucked the whole hood and I shuddered above her and spread my legs wider, grabbed her head to me and pushed her further up and further in. "Fingers," I said, "touch me," hoping to communicate that I needed to be touched on the inside, needed to be filled and fucked and taken.

I felt one, two, three fingers pushed in my body in rapid succession and that was good, Sylvie and I shoved against each other, she pushed with force inside of me and I clamped down on her, trying to keep her from pulling out, trying to coax her to come in farther, to make her hand into a fat cock to fuck me with.

And then she did, not literally, but she put her whole hand in my body and I screamed, screamed from pleasure and from pain, for the full stretching burn of it, a sensation I'd never had before, a fullness which even Micah had not brought me, a depth Richard not touched, and I burned, I burned and shrieked and twisted, happy and hot and good.

She stroked me through the afterglow and worked her hand out, slowly, cautiously, and her touch was light and teasing and I grew hungry again, wanted her touch, wanted to make her come, wanted to feed on her pleasure. So I pulled her up on top of me, and she landed, solid for a moment before she twisted to one side to catch her own wait. She offered me her hand, covered in my wetness, and I blinked at her before I closed my eyes, put out my tongue, delicate and tentative, and tasted a woman for the first time.

It was funky, but in a good way, heavy and earthy and human tasting, sweet but not sugary, not at all, like a flower or incense, but not that smoky, It didn't taste like a man's liquids, but I decided that, if I didn't like it right now, I could learn to. I opened my eyes to see Sylvie's eyes looking straight at me, she had her mouth to the other side of her arm, was licking up, and we came together, tongue's touching, trading my taste back and forth between us.

I hmmm'd in her mouth and she made a soft whuffing noise in reply, something that sounded very breathless, very hungry and needy. "Let me try," I said, and pushed at her shoulder, pushed her over onto her back, put my mouth to her tit and suckled, suckled till it was red and tight and full, then I slipped down, fucked my tongue in and out of her belly button, let the spit pool and collect there til I sucked it up, kept sucking, a vacuum on the tiny indentation until I felt her spread her legs beneath me.

I kissed my way further down her body, kissed past the hardness of bony, kissed past the neat blonde carpet, kissed until I came to her clip, red and hard and urgent, insistent looking. I licked at that, licked hard upwards, down, side to side, looking for the spot, the direction, the tug that was going to make her come off like a rocket, but she seemed good in every direction, so I continued furrther down, got my face all wet in her pussy, used my hands to spread her lips, pushed my tongue into her body, and tased her directly. She tasted both similar and different, in ways I didn't have the vocabulary to identify, but I kept drinking, kept rolling around her liquid in my mouth, breathing in the sweet, heavy smell of her womanhood, kept pushing at the inside of her body with my tongue.

I got one hand around, tried to stick a finger in her body, and she pulled my head back suddenly, pulled me up and off her. "No," she said, "nothing in me but your mouth," and I remembered that Sylvie, confirmed lesbian Sylvie, had been brutally raped by the Master of Beast's sick bastard of a son, and I nodded. I remembered something I'd read in a poetry class once, and put my knee between her legs, pushed my thigh between her wide open lips and pushed up, to give her a platform to rub against.

She clamped her legs around me and pushed forward, pulled back, a hard, fast, fucking rhythm, and I admired her, the gleaming white muscle of her straining and stretching for her pleasure. I lay back down on her, put my head back down and sucked her other tit, gently this time, sucking to have something in my mouth, to give her pleasure, to feel connected to her. I had left myself open in the way of the ardeur, and I could feel how hot she was, how much she wanted ths. And, in a more physical sense, I could feel myself, the wet dripping down my thighs, running over her and me and the dusty grass beneath us.

I needed her to come, needed her to get that last little bit, so I could grab it, drink down her lust and pleasure and my own, so I put my hand between us and practically yanked at her clit. I said, "Come for me, Sylvie, you're almost there, aren't you? Aren't you?"

And her pleasure came and she screamed and with myself open like that, open to drink all her lust, her pleasure brought mine again, and I went over the edge with her.


	25. Chapter 25

I was running late that morning. The sex with Micah and Nathaniel last night had been athletic and long, even for us, and I had overslept. Nathaniel shoved breakfast in my hands as I was on my way out the door, and I swear to god, I'm going to get a set of Donna Read pearls and heels. I won't give them to him while anyone but, maybe, Damian is around, but I'm going to give them to him. I'll have to get him a nice collar to give in front of other people, I think.

But, in any case, Clay and Graham and I leapt in the car (then leapt out to check for explosives, because, really, how stupid would it be to get blown up because you were running late), got back in once we were clear, and then sped across twon. That's the bitch of having a job where you don't go to work until after rush hour is completely clear. You can never blame being late on traffic.

We got to the parking lot, and while I wasn't _running_ in my pumps, I certainly was walking quickly. I was almost to the door when I heard a dull thud, like a body hitting the ground. I turned around—.

I woke up in the dark with a killer headache. I sniffed once, but I wasn't congested. My stomach didn't have that sourness that usually indicated a hangover although my mouth tasted awful. Not that dead fur taste of a hangover, but—. Ah, I'd been knocked out and kidnapped.

I opened my eyes and it was still dark, cave dark. I saw nothing, so I closed my eyes again. It's distracting to expect visual input and get none. I reached out with my hands, first to the side. I didn't have far to go, maybe six inches on either side of me, but what was blocking my right arm was a body. No, a person, a woman I suspected from the bit of flesh I had caught in my hands. And she was alive, because I always recognize the dead and she didn't call to that part of me. But my nose recognized her. She was _lukoi_. Generally speaking, a shapeshifter is exactly the person you want to have to break you out of a box, but it was the day of the full moon, and she was going to be angry. Whoever she was, no matter how low on the hierarchy, she was going to be a threat to me in this circumstance, so we needed to get out sooner rather than later.

I called my beast forward, not all the way, but I wanted to know when the moon was, and my wolf was a much more reliable guide than my head, especially since I'd been unconscious for who knows how long.

I'd forgotten that when I pull my beast forward, my scent changes to reflect the animal I've called. The woman next to me stirred herself, said, "Anita? Is that you?" It was Sylvie. That was better than some, worse than others. Sylvie had a lot of control over her beast, and would not change until the moon forced it upon her. On the other hand, now that I was merely Bolverk, and no longer lupa, she outranked me as Geri. Not by much, but enough that she didn't have to do anything I said, that she might fight me just because she couldn't follow without feeling a loss of face.

"Hey. Do you know where we are?"

"Graveyard," she said. "We've been buried. Hey!" she snapped.

I was shaking, because I was in a little tiny box, underneath the dirt, and there was nothing I could do. I'd had a bad SCUBA accident, and I was afraid of small, cramped, dark places. Normally, this was not a big problem. Regular life very rarely required me to venture into small, cramped, dark places, and on those occasions where it was required for extraordinary circumstances, then I had something I had to _do_ in the dark, someone to rescue, someone to kill.

This was different. This was me trapped, motionless, useless, waiting to die. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

"Stop," said Sylvie, and her voice was thick and only mostly human. "Stop whatever you're thinking, because it's tasty. I mean, you smell afraid. Don't be prey in a little box with me. Today is the full. Don't be prey."

"I can't just stop being afraid on command. That's not how it _works_," I hissed. And there it was a little spark of anger. "Also, who the hell are these people? Why the fuck have they taken me? I haven't done _anything_ to anyone in St. Louis in a good three months. Don't they know who I am?"

"Enough," said Sylvie. Her voice rolled weirdly, the harmonics of her chest changing. "Anger is…only a little better. Don't be a challenger in a box this size, I'll kill you even if I meant only to subdue. There's no room to just hurt you."

"Fuck you," I said, but without much heat. I couldn't draw my gun or even stamp my feet in frustration, so I vented verbally. And even that was way subpar. I couldn't necessarily claim my banter as witty, but it was usually much more original than that.

"We have to get out of here. It's the—."

"Yes, I know. I don't know how to get out. Can you tell how deep we are? Can you tell which cemetery we're in."

I heard her take a deep breath, pulling air and information into her nose. "We are not buried that deep. I do not know the cemeteries so that I can tell the difference between them. There are funeral chemicals and rotting flesh not too far from us, but not cut flowers, I think. There are bodies buried here that have not been preserved, and, like us, they are in a plain wooden box, not the elaborate tombs they sell to dead people."

That was interesting. There were a couple of Jewish cemeteries in town, where people were buried without being embalmed, but those cemeteries were all embalming free. I'd occasionally run into a dead environmentalist or person of some other religion that forbade fixing the body being buried in a non-denomination commercial cemetry, but never more than one at a time. Was this a dump site? What was going on here? "Oh, this is stupid. Why am I asking a _werewolf_ about _dead people_?" I said and took a deep breath of my own. Then I reached out with the clenched fist inside me, the cold wind that is always looking for my people, my flesh, my dead so that they may pull them to me.

Sylvie was right. Right around us were people who had died recently, all within the year, some within the month. And they were the angry dead, murder victims that I dared not raise, for fear they would run in a straight line between themselves and their killer, running through people and property in a mindless search for revenge. I moved out and found the other bodies Sylvie spoke of, gently buried and resting quietly in the ground, a mostly older cemetery, most bodies here for twenty years or more.


	26. Chapter 26

"I can get us out of here," I said.

"How?" asked Sylvie.

"There are dead people here. I can make them do things, dig us out, rip off the box top."

"What are you waiting for?" asked Sylvie.

I reached out, let myself sift among the dead, to find out what they were like in life, if they'd been tall and strong or indolent, infirm. I can't give a corpse extra strength. The dead don't hold anyone back, which is why zombies are so much more effective than the living. But their maximum limit is the strength of the muscles they had when they were buried.

I found four young men, strong. I didn't know what had happened to them, nothing malicious, but it had cut them down in their youth, their prime. Accidents probably. I knew it would be harder to call them without knowing their names, but when I pulled with that part of me that is not a hand, or a voice, or anything but my most personal, most familiar magic, I received a response from only the most recently dead of the four. I told him to dig, then changed my mine and told him to find a shovel, then sat back on my haunches to wonder what had gone wrong.

Most of the animating kit is so much hocus pocus, stage magic for the rubes. Or, no, to be fair, it wasn't just sleight of hand shenanigans, it also helped animators to focus, served as a mnemonic for what was truly necessary, the gift and the will and the blood.

Ah, no blood. That was my problem. I wiggled a bit in the uncomfortably close quarters and came up with a knife. They'd missed the one strapped to my inner thigh. It wasn't that sharp, the silver content was too high for a very fine edge. But since I had extra strength as a lycanthropy carrier, I found I could power a duller blade into bad guy flesh, and I did more damage that way. And the silver content meant that those of my enemies who could be harmed by silver stayed wounded longer. I counted it a win all around.

"I need blood," I said to Sylvie.

"What?"

"To raise a zombie, I have to have blood. I mean, it'd be good to have iron and salt and my ointment, too, but I can't get us out of here without the blood."

"I," I felt her moving in the dark, although I couldn't feel exactly where she was, "I don't think I can control myself, if you are bloody with me on today."

"Let met cut you. That won't trigger you as bad."

"If it doesn't hurt too badly."

"I have a silver knife, not too sharp."

She grumbled at me, and the sound quickly transformed into a growl. "That's not a very good plan," she said.

"Do you have a better one?" I said. "I think I can get us out of here in a couple of hours, but it needs blood first.  
I wholeheartedly approve of you objecting on the grounds that you don't want to get thrown into a bloody frenzy, but is your control going to be any better tonight?"

She growled, but she also pushed her arm into my side. I took her hand as best I could, although the angle was peculiar, and felt for her palm. "You don't want me to do this on your fingertips. I was sacrificing my blood, instead of a chicken's for a while, and I found out exactly how many times a day I go to touch something with my fingers. I'll cut your palm. Hold on."

I sliced down with the knife at an awkward angle, but I could feel the magic of it when her blood welled up, could feel the power suddenly available. I shoved it at the corpses I wanted, the zombie I had already raised. I pulled them toward us and set us to work, and waited for them to reach u, the four of them digging fast and hard but not well.


	27. Chapter 27

"Well?" said Sylvie. Her voice was mostly human now.

"Now, we wait," I said. "Zombies are steady, and the use _all_ of their strength, but they aren't very fast." I tried very hard to keep my tone even, but my angers was slipping from me without any focus, and the zombies were a drain on my powere more than usual, since I hadn't had enough blood or cast a circle.

"Can we talk," asked Sylvie, "or do you have to concentrate?"

"I can talk a little." I shrugged, and found there was a previously unknown pain in my back and shoulders. "is something up with the pack?"

"Richard," she said.

Of course, I thought but didn't say. Richard was teh source of most of Thronos Rokke's problems. I'd thought he'd been doing better, though. He'd made peace with his wolf, and he was looking for a real lup. He hadn't made peace with me, but I was only Bolverk, I didn't have to have an especially easy relationship with the king. "Jason didn't say anything," I offered instead. People sent Jason to me when there were problems. We all knew he could tell me things without pissing me off, better than the rest of them.

"Jason doesn't spend enough time iwth the pack," she said. "He is too much Jean Claude's creature." She spoke with some heat in her vocie, and I could feel her magic rise in the confines of our box.

"I can talk to them," I said. "Jean Claude cares for Jason, he may be willing to, uh, make a trade, if Jason is being hurt by his attentions."

She snorted. "And lose another wolf to Jean Claude's seduction? No, it's not worth it."

I let it go, but made a mental to take it up with someone who liked me and Jason better. "His temper? Richard's, I mean? When I was on my trip, I saw Jamil and Shang-Da…. I've offered to help him, take it from him, but he won't see me to do it. He needs to appear available for the lupas."

"It's the lupa candidates that are the problem!" she spat.

I blinked. I hadn't met most of the lupa candidates. One had come to my house in an emergency, but otherwise, I steered clear of them. I know it's, at least in some sense, hypocritical, but I don't like sharing my men.


	28. Chapter 28

At that moment, I felt a pull on my heart. No, not my heart, but it's a place in my personal magic that is close to my heart. It's the place where my triumvirate with Nathaniel and Damian lies, and I felt a pull, a frantic, frightened, urgent pull. And I was cold, frozen, iced. "Oh shit," I said, "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."

"What?" asked Sylvie.

"I didn't eat breakfast."

Sylvie sighed. "You live with two wereleopards, don't you know that food is not optional."

"I know," I snapped. "I know," I repeated less aggressively. "Which is why Nathaniel made up a breakfast for me to eat at the office, but I inconveniently got kidnapped before I got there." I shivered, from the terrible cold coming from the core of me, but also because I had just thought about what happened to me in some greater detail. "Were you alone? When they kidnapped you, were you alone?"

"Gwen leaves the house before I do, thank god," she said.

"I had bodyguards." I tried to get my hands in a position to rub together, to create some friction and energy. The heat of my hands wouldn't touch the cold I was feeling. It wasn't really my cold.

"That's bad. Are they here?"

"What?"

"Are their bodies buried around us somewhere? Or are they buried alive around us somewhere?"

"They're not dead around us. I would feel a corpse with a soul, if there were two fresh kills around. I'm not sure about whether or not I could feel someone alive, who wasn't projecting their power at me." I shrugged and shivered, although I knew she couldn't see me. "They were pack. Couldn't you tell if they were here alive?"

"I don't smell anyone alive here except us." I felt a touch get me none too gently in the stomach. "Why are you wiggling around? We probably have limited oxygen, since we're buried under—"

"Shhh!" I said. "I'm claustrophobic. Don't freak me out more. And I'm shivering because I'm cold."

"Then come here," said Sylvie. She grabbed me and pulled me closer to her, surrounding me with her shapeshifter body temperature, with her lukoi smell. "Feel safe, feel at home."

It didn't work. I could feel my beasts within me, and the one who was scared and frantic and angry, the one most troubled by the ice, was my leopard. "I need," I said, and trailed off. I couldn't ask for what I wanted, couldn't feed my hungers in this tiny box, the two of us trapped too closely together for the vigorous rutting that the _ardeur_ requires to fully feed. And, besides, I didn't know how to do a woman, had never given it any real thought.

"You need something magical, right?" she said. "How close are the zombies to us?"

I reached out with my mind to my zombies. They couldn't give much feedback back. I wasn't seeing or hearing through their bodies, wasn't receiving words from their minds, such as they were. It was more like getting information from a finger or a toe, except I wasn't getting a sense of touch from them either. It was just my sense of the dead, and the zombie dead are just not that concerned about the world around them. "I can't tell," I said to Sylvie. "It doesn't work that—." I stopped because I heard a thunk on the lid of our box. "Hold on," I said, and reached out to the zombies, directing them to stop digging and start prying the lid off our enclosure.

The zombies pulled and pried, and a square inch of grey sky was visible above us. Sylvie pushed me to the side, and used her legs. She kicked the lid of the box off, kicked it up and clear of us, took a couple of my zombies' hands with it. I tried to be mad (I lobby for legislation to protect the dignity of zombies) but I couldn't quite manage it. I was so glad to be out of that damn box, out in the free and open air. I gasped in great lungfuls, although I hadn't had any difficulty breathing in the box.

Sylvie pulled herself out, then helped me out. She was dressed in a grey business suit, with a little flag pin, and her hair pulled back. Her shoes were missing, and I couldn't tell if she'd been buried without them or had lost them in our escape. "Were you on your way to work when you got kidnapped?" I asked.

She nodded sharply, while looking around us on all sides, looking for I knew not what.

"We need to get out of here," she said.

"Do you know which way to go? Do you have a way to let someone know we need help?"

"No," she said. "But do you think we're the first bodies whoever kidnapped us has buried here. If they come to dump someone else, the jig is up."

I nodded, because she had a good point. "Give me a minute. I need to put the zombies back, and then we'll go." I looked around for a sharp rock. "I need more blood," I said. "I'll do it this—." She thrust a bloody forearm in front of my face. "Okay," I said. "Thanks." I took the blood on my fingers and made a throwing gesture at the corners of the cemetery. "I bury all the dead of this place. I bid you rest in peace. I command you with blood. Lay down. Lay down." It was not at all my usual spiel, but working with my friend Marianne, the witch, I'd learned that none of the rituals were required as I had been taught, that they were methods of focusing and channeling my power and my will, but that I could substitute others as necessary. In this case, as I didn't know the names of any of my zombies, I felt something original was required.

I turned to face Sylvie, and saw that she had already started walking. I moved to follow her and took about three steps before I fell down. My cry as I hit the dirt made Sylvie turn around and look.

"What's wrong with you?" she said.

"Damian," I said. "My vampire, I'm feeding him. He's draining me. I don't have the life to sustain us both." Damnit, I thought. God. Fucking. Damnit. I was never skipping, or even delaying, breakfast again.

"There are rabbits here," she said, walking back to me, leaning over me. "I can chase one for you, gut it and strip the fur." She reached a hand out and touched me.

I like to think that if I had been less distracted by thoughts of Damian experiencing a permanent extinguishing and the unanswered question of what would happen to Nathaniel in the event of Damian's death, that if I had been less tired and less scared, if I hadn't just raised and lain four zombies with almost no ritual and precious little blood, that I would have moved to stop her, would have avoided her touch.

I'm not sure that's true, though. For one thing, it had been a very long time since the _ardeur_ had risen without my control because I was hungry. Belle Morte had stripped my control and the Harlequin had queered it, but when left to my own devices, I rose and lowered the ardeur of my own choice. Frankly, I had forgotten that the ardeur had once come without my deliberate intervention. And it certainly hadn't come before without warning, without some intermediate stage of increasing arousal. I suppose are despaerate circumstances, the pain I was in, and the drain the zombies represented helped hide the symptoms. But I just do not think it would ever have occurred to me that the _ardeur_ would rise from the simple touch of a woman.

The other part, and this is the part that is a bit harder to acknowledge, is that I'm ruthless. I will protect what is mine at any and all costs, and Damian needed this. He needed me to raise him and maintain him, I was the source of his animation, I made his heart beat, I made him wake and rise. And I had spent so much magic, and had so little bolstering of my own energy, that he was dying. And if a little lesbian sex was what it took to keep him from dying, I was not opposed to that. Or rather, I was opposed, but the alternative of his death was completely unacceptable.

I did regret having sex with someone who would never have touched me that way, who, I think, did not see me as a potential sex object and would not have consented to have sex with me otherwise. I don't rape people. I try not to overwhelm their free will. I've done it a few times, but always on purpose and always in life or death circumstances. While life or death still applied to what Sylvie and I had gone through, my intent was lacking. And I do regret that.

But it happened. Sylvie reached for me, touched my shoulder with her hand, and we were both caught in a blaze of arousal, a surge of lust, the white hot need to have at each other.

\---Of course, naked, covered in dirt and our sexual juices, obviously shivering in the afterglow, is exactly when the cop cars came.

Sylvie and I couldn't have been buried in some dinky cemetery out in the middle of nowhere, of course. No, we were buried in a cemetery within the city limits, a cemetery which bordered on (or was contained within, I couldn't quite figure out which and didn't particularly care at the time) a residential area. A residential area with a thriving Neighborhood Watch. And some good citizen saw four strapping young men digging a grave and took it upon herself to call the cops.

Don't get me wrong, I think she did the right think. And I was, eventually, glad for the ride back to the Circus. But goddamn, the timing on that could not have been worse if Zerbrowski had done it on purpose.

They hadn't killed Clay and Graham. My bodyguards had been hit with enough sedative to fell an elephant, literally, in a dart with a silver-tipped needle. I had been hit with considerably less sedative, but I'd also been beaten about the head and shoulders. Well, more likely kicked, actually, I had one bruise with a distinct Doc Marten tread pattern. I also had some puncture marks, although the doctors weren't able to determine if I'd had blood drawn or things injected. If I'd been dosed with a small amount of something mild, I had metabolized it by the time anyone thought to check the kidnap victims for drugs.

Sylvie, it seemed, had been hit with the same sort of dart as the body guards. If she'd been needlepricked or kicked anywhere else, the damaged had all healed by the time the paramedics examined her at the scene.

The sexual assault kits didn't turn up any bruising, and the only fluids were ours. I begged and pleaded with them to leave the sex out of the report, but they wouldn't. The best I could get them to do was link it to the zombie raising I had done, which was more or less true, so I let it go.

They'd found me with Nathaniel's help. A client of ours spotted the unconscious guards in our parking lot and called the cops. The cops, in turn, called my paramours to see what they could see. And Nathaniel revealed something he had never mentioned to me, that he always knew where I was. Or, he could always know where I was. It wasn't something he had to pay attention to and register unless we were in the same room. But he could get in a car with Dolph and keep them pointed at us like a compass.

When they pulled into the cemetery parking lot, Nathaniel was out of the car first, and he ran to the point where we were, on the far side of the cemetery. He picked me up and wrapped me in his jacket and said, with his nostrils flared out, obviously smelling what we had just done, "Oh, thank god, Damian is going to be okay."


	29. Chapter 29

The cops asked me what I knew, but I didn't know anything. They didn't believe me. But I hadn't smelled or sensed anything preternatural, and neither had Sylvie. As best we could tell, humans had done this.

There were two human beings who had taken an interest in my life of late: Mrs. Van Diesel and the reporter Clarice Sterling. Zerbrowski had warned me that the Sons of Adam might want to kill me, but he hadn't said anything about them kidnapping and killing lycanthropes. And Sterling was making a lot of people's lives miserable with her stories outing us, but she hadn't physically approached anyone, let alone offered them violence.

And yet, and yet. If I had to make a bet, I would say that a criminal who had an established pattern of behavior was unlikely to deviate from it, but that it was far more likely that someone you didn't know was a criminal would commit crimes that left you thinking, "I never would have expected that."

I got together some of the rats, who had been mercenaries before Rafael had recruited them, and some of the werewolves, who were hunters, and the vampires, who were old and, occasionally, wise, and I ran my thoughts by them. They all thought I should talk to both sets of human beings, but that Sterling should be handled delicately. On the record, for an interview, and I would have to hold back my special methods of persuasion. Too much violence, too much threat, and she'd have too good a story for the evening edition.

The great thing about threatening a terrorist organization like the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve is that they don't go to the cops. Natural enemies, and all that.

Ronnie called me the day after I got home. I had called in and cancelled all of my appointments. I wasn't actually feeling that bad, but there are days, and plenty of them, when I wish I could be doing something else. The monster-hunting is a better fit for my personality than the animating, honestly. There's so much _customer service_ involved in working with the clients, and I'm not one for niceness and handholding. I can't quit. If I don't raise the dead on purpose, I raise it accidentally, and I live in the woods now. I don't need a bunch of roadkill or owl spoor wending its way toward Nathaniel's garden. But I've been thinking lately about maybe cutting back, on my office hours if not on the animation itself. I struggle balancing so many men, friends, and enemies, in my day to day life. I'd love to be able cut down on clients.

Anyway, Ronnie got me out of bed and asked me to meet her for lunch. I told her I'd see her at Burnt Offerings. I hadn't been in a while, and the cheesy, over-the-top nature of the place made it a nice contrast with the Circus, which is over-the-top in a disorienting, disconcerting, unpleasant way.

I got us a booth in the back, and I got a double hamburger, a strawberry Coke float, a Cobb salad, and a dripping red velvet cake, a house specialty. As far as I can tell, it's a regular red velvet cake with a cherry coulis, but the tourists love anything that's reminiscent of blood. Burnt Offerings is the only burger joint in town where you have to request that your burger is more done than medium rare.

Ronnie came in and got a regular salad, looked at my plate in astonishment. "You hate to eat."

I shrugged. "With the thing, I've got to."

"The thing?" She looked at me blankly, then blinked. "Oooh, the _thing_. Okay. Weird. I mean." She snapped her mouth shut, then sighed. "Let me start over, okay?"

I nodded, but didn't say anything. I was too busy trying to keep from dripping burger juice everywhere. A rare burger is _delicious_, but it's also a fucking mess.

"The unfortunate thing is, I'm going to have to up the charges. It became obvious pretty fast from watching your friend that she wasn't physically meeting any contacts. So, I got a computer guy I have on retainer to do some snooping, find out who she was calling, who she was getting e-mail and things from."

I put my burger down and wiped my fingers. I didn't want to be surprised with something in my mouth.

"The person who has been feeding her info is a guy named Gilbert Sully." She shuddered delicately. "I don't know why some people's parents hate them. I mean, he hadn't even been born yet, how could they hate him that much? Getting his real name brought getting his phone number and address, but I didn't get any additional info on him because I'd already spent beyond what you'd authorized with the computer guy. He's pretty damn expensive."

I frowned and leaned forward. "I told you I was paying for this. You know I'm not hurting for cash, and I need—."

She waved me back. "I also figured it might not be necessary. His screen name is foxxy67-0. Didn't you tell me a lot of shapeshifters add a -0 to whatever screennames they have, so those who know, know what they are?"

I nodded absently as I sipped at my milkshake. I couldn't think of a Gilbert that I knew. And then I asked, "Did you say his screen name was foxxy?"

Ronnie nodded.

"That son of a bitch. I'm going to hurt him. I'm going to give him to Richard to hurt him. I'll—." I shut my mouth. Ronnie didn't know everything that I did, all the ways that we kept things peaceable in St. Louis, and I didn't particularly want to enlighten her. I didn't want her to think less of me, even though I knew what I was planning was necessary.

"Don't tell me anything the cops can ask me about later," said Ronnie.

I blinked, looked at her with a question in my eyes.

"When I was still a good little girl, who still went to church, I had friends who were gay. They weren't out, they weren't prepared to be out for a long time, if ever." She swallowed, wouldn't look me in the eye. "They got found out. The whole church knew. Their mothers were put in the bulletin under Needs Prayer. They couldn't go to Sunday School, and they stopped coming to services. Becky ended up drinking a bottle of bleach." She shook her head, and sat up straighter, let the life come back into her eyes. "Outing people is wrong. Do what you need to do. I just don't want to have to lie for you while I'm being interrogated."


	30. Chapter 30

I went back to my house. I hadn't been to my house in a couple of weeks, while I was being punished by Jean Claude. But I had let Noah and Cherry and Gabriel stay at the house. I didn't like leaving it empty if I was going to be away so long, and they were over at my place more often than not anyway.

I needed to go to my house, because it was a place all of my wereleopards could come and plot. It was a place where I could arrange wereanimal things without being contradicted. If Richard had been available I might have called him. By rights, I should have called Rafael and Narcissus, as they had the two largest contingents of animals in St. Louis, and they were both out.

I should have thought about calling my Rex, but I didn't trust Haven with anything, and before I decided whether or not I wanted to kill Gil, I wanted to talk to him first. I didn't know what _how_ Auggie had taught Haven to deal with traitors, but I thought it was possible he'd kill them first, before finding out what he'd been thinking, before finding out the full extent of what had been done. That was unacceptable to me. I needed to contain the damage more than I needed to vent my rage.

But we'd come to this house because this was an animal thing, and I didn't want jean Claude to get involved, didn't want him to suggest a more diplomatic solution or a less violent ending for the evening. This was animal, and it was vengeance, and it was protection, and it was mine.

We were in the living room. My cats were spread around me, most half-naked, a few of them dressed in leather or lace that showed they'd come from a job, even if it was mid-afternoon. They were all focused on me, following my every move with their eyes, except for Micah against whom I was reclining, and Nathaniel who knelt at my feet with my hand resting on his head.

"Do we bring Gil here?" asked Caleb. "I don't think we should bring him here, in case we have to kill him."

"Does it matter if we kill him? We're usually pretty efficient with the bodies," said Gabriel.

"We don't eat traitors, son," said Merle. "And we don't generally eat outside the family."

Zane blushed and ducked his head, then looked back up at me. All of my cats had big eyes tonight, shining and black with pupil. They were in hunting mode, and all they saw was motion. All they searched for was prey.

I shook my head the slightest bit. "We'll take him to a cemetery. There's an old one, Dougall, down the road from here about four miles. I had to raise a body there one time. No one's been officially buried there for fifty years, and there's no one around to see us in the dark.

There was a soft rumbling that rose from all assembled. They were purring, pleased, at the prospect of a hunt.

"The thing is," I said, "we need to be able to check Gil's story against the reporter's. We need to talk to her first. And she can't be kidnapped or hurt unless we decide to kill her." I blinked, and the whole room shifted towards me at once. Their hunting mode was useful, but it was also a little freaky, since I wasn't caught up in the blood lust with the rest of them. "Cheryl, you call her and set up an interview for tonight. Gil can wait as long as we need in the cemetery. We're not afraid of the dark." I grinned, and they grinned back. Some of my alphas had long, long teeth.


	31. Chapter 31

Nathaniel drove us, he, Micah, and myself, to the Circus, to wait for Cherry's call that she had the journalist. I wanted to see Damian for myself. I was worried that he wasn't going to be all right, that the sex with Sylvie hadn't been enough, that he would be damaged.

I was probably worrying myself needlessly. This wasn't the first time that Damian had suffered because I couldn't fill my hunger as soon as I ought. But I was afraid that the damage would be cumulative, that the hurts would stay and multiply.

I knew that wasn't how damaged work with the dead. Damage was either permanent or it healed. Sometimes it healed more slowly than other times. But as I'd gotten closer to vampires, as I grew to like some (like Willie) and love others (Jean Claude, Asher, and Damian), I became less objective about their hurts, more concerned that they would enjoy the same good—well, it wasn't health, but something—for the foreseeable future.

It was still early when we got to the Circus, still daylight. But Damian met us just inside the door. I clutched him to me, hugged him, and I felt soothed, calmed, controlled again. I could let him go, stand back a little, although I kept a hand on the bare skin of his forearm. "You're alive. Or not dead. Or—."

"I am animate," he said.

"Yes." I nodded. "Yes, yes, you are." I pulled him down the stairs, down to my bedroom. "Come on. I want to see you."

"I'm all right, Anita," he said, but he followed me fast, and he sounded amused somehow, pleased, I think.

"Should we stay here?" asked Micah.

Nathaniel was already coming down the steps behind us. He said, "She's going to fuck him. I think I need to be there, but, uh, not you. Sorry."

I looked back, and nearly tripped. Damian tightened his grip on my hand so I wouldn't fall, the preternatural vampire strength grabbing me firmly.

MIcah looked, I don't know, I couldn't interpret the look. Not upset, but resigned perhaps. I turned away, quickly. I couldn't get mad while I was touching Damian, or, at least, I couldn't get angry to mask some other emotion. And, right now, all I would feel was regret, perhaps a little shame. I loved them _all_, truly, but there was only so much of me to go around, wasn't there?


	32. Chapter 32

The room was dark when we go to it, and I didn't stop any way. Nathaniel kept the floor clear, I could trust that, and the bed was a straight shot from the door. I pulled myself and Damian on to it. Then I kicked my shoes off, pulled off the scrubs they'd given me at the hospital. (I had the brief, fleeting thought that I should have grabbed something to wear while I was at the house. I didn't because the leopards don't care about clothes, would have been just as at ease with me naked, but whatever.)

Nathaniel came behind us and said, "'Ware," then turned on the lights.

I said, "Thanks," without turning around, but my eyes were all for Damian. I pushed him back on the bed until he lay flat against the pillows, hair the color of garnets fanning out on the black sheets, white skin practically glowing. The glowing was not necessarily a good sign. Damian could usually keep himself looking more human than that. He looked particularly vampiric, now. It's not a gauntness, exactly, but there's almost a shadow under the skin of a vampire who is not pretending to be human. I didn't like the look on my Damian. "Have you eaten today?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I only woke up about ten minutes before you got here. I did not know I had been in trouble, except Nathaniel put a note in my coffin."

I wanted to be angry, but I wasn't because I straddled his thighs and my hands were running up and down his arms. He wore a bright green tank top and white sleep pants, which was bizarrely casual for most vampires, but made him look more like part of the household when he was chez Blake. Damian was a great one for fitting in and not making waves. "Then you will from me and Nathaniel."

He shook his head. "It's not necessary. I am working tonight, and it is easy enough to—."

"I want you tonight," I said, and I leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, lay on him, my body flat on his, pressing my breasts into him, my thighs squeezing his hips. "You can't do the things I want with no blood."

"Really?" said Damian, and smiled. Damian I shorted, not exactly on purpose. And shorted not of my attentions, but I slept with him less often than most of the others. I felt wrong touching him, in many of the same ways I had felt about Nathaniel. I was so responsible for him, directly responsible for his continued undeath, beyond the responsibility any parent has ever known toward child, and it felt like an abuse of power, a taking in our relationship.

I had tried explaining this to Jean Claude and Asher once, and they had laughed themselves silly at me. Jean Claude had said, "Anita, you are so young and so American. I truly cannot grasp the way you think sometimes. In the time I was alive, and this was outside of any machination of Belle's you understand, this was among regular human beings, sex was just another thing that could be demanded by the master of the servant. If the master had the use of your body to dress himself, or dump his shit, why would it be different for him to use your body to make himself come? This American insistance on the particularity of sex as separate from all other endeavors in human life is so bizarre, I cannot always bring myself to credit it. I mean, yes, of course, it was a sin, but so was anger, so was gluttony, and the rich indulged those just as shamefully, just as ostentatiously.

"As for the issue of your relationship, your tie of mystical master and servant giving you special power to convince him to bed you, let me assure you, as _your_ master, I have found you the least seducible of women, the most resistant to my charms, and I convinced you to date me only through death threats to another, and you had sex with me because Richard transformed on top of you and ate a corpse. No, no, _ma petite_ there are many benefits to having a human servant, and, thus, presumably, a vampire servant, but the ability to control the servant is most definitely not one of those pluses."

I wasn't exactly comforted by this discussion, but I had started trying to invite Damian to bed more. It was still rare enough, though, that he was specially pleased at me this afternoon, and he smiled shyly, like a little boy promised a sweetie. "Yes, Damian, I want you. I want you to touch me everywhere, I want to see every inch of our skin, I want your body inside mine."

"_Mistress_," he breathed, and it sounded a little too much like a prayer, so I ignored it.

Instead, I pulled off his shirt, pulled it up and over his head, and looked at the great expanse of pale, strong chest. My Damian had been a berserker, who had an immense sword, and the muscles he had gained in life he had kept in death. I poked and prodded at his chest, and I could find no hint of softness in all that muscle. His skin was pliant, he wasn't the wooden stock form Jean Claude occasionally took when he was very upset or very weak, but he had a real hardbody and I loved it.

I put my mouth to his chest and I sucked on him, deep, bruising kisses that would leave no marks, because he didn't have the blood to fill the bruises.

He sighed beneath me, and brought his fingers up to play with my hair. I hmm'd into his chest at that. I love to have my hair played with, and Damian had the gentlest hands of all of the men I was currently with.

The bed dipped beside us, and I turned my head to see Nathaniel curled up beside us. He'd lost the shorts and wifebeater I'd made him wear to drive over here, and his cock was hard, but the look on his face, was peaceful and watchful at the same time. "Hey," he said, since I was watching him.

_Love you_, I mouthed at him, so Damian wouldn't see. I couldn't bring myself to say the words to Damian, since I wasn't in love with him. So I kept saying them to others to myself. Out loud I said, "Give us your arm."

Nathaniel stretched his arm out over my head, resting on Damian's chest. "Whenever you're ready," he told Damian, "but don't do anything for me, I don't want to be rolled, I want to feel you sink you're teeth in." Nathaniel meant it, he was a serious masochist, and the pain would turn him on.

I liked biting, but a vampire bite without being rolled was a lot higher than my pain tolerance, especially with no real warmup. Instead of watching the blood exchange, I kissed my way down Damian's torso, until I got to the jeans he'd been wearing. I undid the buttons (not with my teeth, I'd had a vision of explaining to my dentist how I'd chipped my tooth, and given that sort of showing off up), and licked beneath. Vampires don't smell like human beings exactly, but they do have their own individual smells, and they do accumulate any place that's closed up: arm pits, feet, crotch. I breathed in the dry paper and oak scent of Damian, let the rich flavor of him roll right back to the top of my throat. It was a good smell, made me think of rainy afternoons in fall curled up in front of a fire with a book, made me think of building a life with all of them.

Then I pulled his pants further down, and found his cock, small and shriveled and soft, and I licked it once, twice before sucking it in.


	33. Chapter 33

I feel the blood flowing above my head, there's a tiny trickle of magic flowing between the two of them. It's something I've never felt before, with a vampire taking blood. I wonder if, if I ever paid attention to Jean Claude taking Richard's blood, if I would feel something similar? I've never felt it when Jean Claude took blood from me, but he only takes blood from me as I'm about to come, or if something has gone very, very wrong. I can't particularly expect that I'll ever be in the right state to feel it.

And maybe it has to be the legs of the triangle, not the master who powers the whole thing. Maybe the closest thing between Jean Claude, Richard, and I is when I feed the _ardeur_ from Richard. I make a mental note to ask Jean Claude later, if he's felt that, felt my magic and Richard's binding together.

Damian makes a noise and tugs on my hair a little, and I realize I've been rude. One should pay attention when having sex with someone else, to my way of thinking. Meandering is pretty rude, and I try not to do. I suck harder at Damian, in mute apology, and grasp his sac in my hand, giving it a firm tug, which is the way he likes it. He's still soft, but his balls are trying to draw up already. I don't know whether to be impressed at his prowess or ashamed that I touch him so rarely, he's just about ready to go off right now.

He puts a hand to my forehead and pushes me back ever so gently. "Please," he says, "I don't want to go off like that."

"You can come soft?" asks Nathaniel. His eyes are closed, but his mouth is open, pink tongue peeking out to rest on his lower lip.

"I—yes, I can. But it's painful." His mouth twists up for a moment, ugly and small. "Can I have more?" He pulls gently on Nathaniel's wrist.

Nathaniel's eyes slit open, and I can see that the pupil shape has changed. He's got cat eyes now, which is pretty fucking freaky, because Nathaniel was not, to my knowledge, strong enough, alpha enough, magic enough for a partial change. He turned his head so his eyes were looking at me, instead of Damian, and he said, "This binding makes me stronger, but I have a little less control over my body, when I'm excited. Things sometimes flip back and forth without my meaning to."

And that's a pretty damn clear demonstration that Nathaniel can read my mind, so I check my mental shields and realize that I've opened up a way in for all the men I love most: Jean Claude, Micah, Asher, Richard, Damian, Nathaniel. Oh, hell. I close my eyes to re-envision my smooth rock walls, and when I'm sure that the only person in my head is me, I open my eyes back up. "Are you up to giving Damin a little more blood?" I'm ignoring what he said, on purpose. This new triumvirate, it makes me uneasy with its very simplicity, the fact that it just works with no pushing and pulling between us. Except to worry about Damian when I don't feed the ardeur, I try to ignore it completely.

Nathaniel laughs at me, the nearly voiceless _whuff_ a cat might make, and closes his eyes. "Come on, Damian, drink some more."

"Shall I roll you this time?" Damian turns his head to look at Nathaniel, eyes glittering green in the dim light.

"No," says Nathaniel. "I like the pain more. But Anita, if you could…?" He uncurls himself a little, and I can see that he's hard, and the end of him is shiny with his body's own fluid. I grab him firmly and pull him hard.

Damian strikes, this time rolling to his side and putting his teeth in Nathaniel's neck.


	34. Chapter 34

Damian began to swell and fill my mouth, and I loved the way that felt, pushing back on my tongue as I backed up to keep him out of my throat, the velvet-soft texture of him smoothing as the wrinkles filled with blood, the firm, hard smoothness of his length. I took the root of him in my hand and squeezed, not too firm, just to feel the swelling another way, feel the heat of him, feel the leashed tension where he wanted to push, but would not allow himself the small rudeness.

"Anita," he moaned above him. He didn't say anything else, didn't really even moan, but his hand went to the back of my head, and he threaded his fingers in my hair, brushed out the full length of it. It's half-way down my back, because of a pact I made with Micah, so Damian stretched it over my head and let it fall around us. I felt the hair brush my ears, and it was sweet and sensual and added to the whole of it.

Then I pulled off Damian, because this wasn't a simple exercise in sex, I didn't want to just get him off, although that was coming, I wanted to see his body. So I pulled his pants off, and ran my hands up and down his legs, feeling the heat of his body and the strength of the muscles, that his skin was pliant and soft and human. I reached up, past his waist, to his stomach and chest, and he lay perfectly still for several seconds as I drew the pads of my fingers softly, softly, over his sides, around his belly button, to his nipples. He drew a breath and asked, "Anita?"

I leaned forward and kissed him, kissed into his mouth, licked between his fangs. I could taste the faintest trace of Nathaniel's blood in his mouth, as I put my arms around him and ran my hands up and down his back, felt the ridges of his back muscle, the strength in his shoulders. "Damian," I muttered in his mouth, "tell me what you want."

He breathed in and out again, several times. I think I must have frightened him when he stopped while I was running my hands over him. The old ones are mostly used to breathing when they're not trying to frighten anyone. "I want you," he said. "I would like, I would like Nathaniel to help me. Help us, actually."

Nathaniel pressed a hand to my back, and covered my hand on Damian's shoulder. "Of course," he said. "Whatever you need. Whatever you want."


	35. Chapter 35

"I want us," said Damian, "to take her together. I want our bodies to press against each other inside of her."

"Ooh," said Nathaniel. "Oh!" He rolled over and kissed me, pushed his tongue in my mouth and licked there, overwhelmed me a bit with it. Then he turned to Damian and kissed him as well, not the deep probing he'd done of me, but a fierce, hard, fast thank you with his mouth. "You need to make her come first, at least once. She's got to loosen up. Go down on her." And he got up and ran out of the room.

I blinked, as I hadn't expected that, then Damian was suddenly flipping us over, so I was on my back and he was leaning over me, kissing me, this kiss gentle and sweet and drinking of me, as if he sipped at my vein. "Do you, is this okay with you?" he asked. "I don't want to hurt you, you know that, but I, I feel more…," he shrugged, frustrated that the words wouldn't come. "You've created some binding between us, myself and Nathaniel. And he calls to me, as no animal has called to me before."

I kissed him back, then kissed along his jaw, to his ear, "This is good for me. It will be good for me. I like, I like men." I don't know if he heard it in my voice, but when I said it, I meant that I liked multiple men, not just one man. "Come on, make me come off one time, like Nathaniel said. You're neither of you small." It wasn't flattery. I was pretty sure that the two of them squashed into me at once would roughly equal one and a half times Micah's width, and Micah was the _widest_ man I'd ever been with.


	36. Chapter 36

Damian reached his hand between our bodies, slicked his fingers into me, and felt for that little bit of me between my legs that felt so good. I moaned at him and brought my mouth to his shoulder, bit him, gently still. I wasn't that far gone.

He was good with his hand, but the angle was awkward. I rolled us over, so I was on my back and he was free to do whatever he wanted.

He pulled back between my legs, looked at me, my whole body under his hands and smiled, smiled, smiled, smiled. "I am so glad to be here, Anita," he said.

I smiled back at him, heart a little troubled. Damian was, in some ways, the man in my life who troubled me most. He needed me so much, literally needed me to breathe and think and feel, and there were so many men of my own ahead of him on the list. Hell, although Richard wasn't really my problem, he was one to whom I was emotionally more connected, still. I tried to keep all that from my face, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

His smile faded and he said, "What can I do to make you want me?"

I opened my mouth, but all I could say was, "I don't know. My heart goes where it goes." Even as I said it, I ran my hands up and down his thigh. The problem for Damian wasn't that I didn't love him best. He was centuries old, and he knew enough of human relations to not expect that. And She Who Made Him, the mistress for whom he'd been a favorite, had been a nighthag. It had cured him of wanting the favorite status.

But he did want me as a man wants a women. He didn't want my love, he wanted my desire. But unfortunately for Damian, my desire followed my love. And, at this point in time, I loved Jason more than I loved Damian. And Jason, too, was never going to be my best beloved, even if he was, now, my wolf to call.

"I _hate_ all Belle Morte's get. They have it so easy," he said. "They make you want them so easily." His face went fierce and ugly for a minute, and I thought he might bite, not me, he'd never bite his master without her bidding, but the pillow, the bed, his own arm.

I sat up then, and put one hand on his shoulder, another behind his head. "Damian," I said, clearly, directly, the way I would say it to a zombie, "make me come off. Stop moping."

He was my creature, and he had to obey my command. I felt a little sick, manipulating his lack of free will. But on the other hand, he was using his freewill to make himself more unhappy. And I didn't want him to be unhappy.

So, I closed my eyes and let myself float, float on the feeling of his mouth on my breast, the feeling of his hands playing once more between my legs. He stretched my body around his fingers, first three, and then, as I got wetter, four. Finally, he got all five fingers inside of me, a thing I'd never had before.

"Damian," I said, "do it, come on, do it." I was whimpering through my words, but he had me, he had me right on the edge, teetering on the brink of a real explosion.

He pushed his hand into me, sunk himself up to his wrist, and I pushed, strained back. Then he bent himself nearly in half and got his mouth on my clit, and I went off. I exploded like a rocket, spinebending, legskicking, screams of pleasure. I reached for something to touch, but Damian had seen enough men leave my bed to keep out of reach, so I tore into the sheets, the mattress, the pillows. When my body relaxed again and I caught my breath, I saw feathers floating around us, and realized that we hadn't folded back the duvet before we'd gotten started, that that was the source of the debris.

"Was that sufficient, Anita?" asked Damian. His voice was subdued, not the happy purring it had been before.

I wanted to curl up and reach for him, but his hand was still inside me, and it felt awkward to try to move my body around. "Come here," I said instead, and opened my arms.

He slid his hand out of me, and lay on top of me again. I pushed his hair back from his face, sweeping it to the side to let us see one another. "Yes?"

"Damian, I'm not doing this to hurt you. I want to give you what you want," I said, and I kissed him, deep and slow. "I want you to make me feel good, I want to make you feel good."

I heard the door open and close quietly, and I could feel Nathaniel getting closer to us.

"I want to touch you, and be touched by you. I want to wrap myself in your arms, I want your body all over mine." This was all true, as far as it went. He was too old for me to lie to, he would have known the lie. "Enjoy me, Damian. That's what I want."

Nathaniel climbed on the bed beside us. "Are you ready for me, or should I come back later?"


	37. Chapter 37

Damian turned to look at him, and he smiled and rolled off of my body to the side. "Come," he said. "Kiss her. I want to watch you."

Nathaniel beamed at him in return, then crawled up my body. He held himself above me on hands and knees, so the only point at which we touched was our mouths. He kissed me softly, sweetly, slowly, and I relaxed under him, felt the arousal slip away on a sea of tenderness and comfort.

Then he dropped down onto me, and began to feed at my mouth, sucking on me with a deep, boundless hunger that I knew I could never feel. And that got me warm again, got my arms to go around him and pull him close to me, tight to me. I could feel his cock pressed to me, pressed to my stomach, heavy and hot.

Then another hand pulled me off Nathaniel's mouth, yanked at my hair in a way I liked. Damian took my mouth, and this time he didn't leave me cold, he just made me patient, willing to wait for whatever it was they were going to do with my body, willing to take whatever they put in me.

"I want to go in first," said Damian. "Get up."

And Nathaniel rolled off of me, no longer touching me, and then my arousal did start to go. I reached to the side, grabbed the nearest bit of him, which was his thigh, until the pressures they each brought to bear on my personality evened out a bit. Damian's eyes flicked to my movement, but he said nothing to me or to Nathaniel. He just lifted me upward and pulled me to where he was sitting, on the edge of the bed, and then he lifted me up above his lap, clear of his manhood. "Nathaniel, put me in position."

Nathaniel crawled across the bed and grabbed Damian's cock with one and my ass with the other. "I'll get you together," he said.

The two of them eased me down on Damian's member and I sighed with delight as I was filled up, not to bursting, but pleasantly. I started to rock myself back and forth, but Damian held me down by the hips. Then he brought his torso back, until he was lying flat on the bed, and he told Nathaniel, "Get in. Get in now. I won't last long."

Nathaniel came up behind me, standing next to the bed, and he wiggled his way inside me, alongside Damian. I was full, so full. It hurt, but it in a good way. I was almost on the verge of coming, just from the feeling of fullness.

Then Nathaniel leaned forward over me and Damian sat back up, and just that tiny movement from both their bodies set me off, made me scream and writhe between them, upon them, bearing down on them inside me together, my hands set into Damian's shoulders and ripping him up, coming and coming and coming and coming.

I blacked out, then came to and felt them coming in me, and I feasted on them with the ardeur, drank them down, and I was very full indeed.


	38. Chapter 38

I walked into the hotel room and finally saw the woman who had started all of our problems. (Well, okay, the kidnapping, maybe that had been all the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, but she had started many of our other problems for today.) The reporter was little and blonde, with a cherubic little face: button nose, china doll blue eyes, rosy cheeks, long lashes. She had the whole disarming package, and I immediate distrusted her.

Irving had spoken of her with respect, and anyone who looked like that, and was good at her job, and had other people _recognize_ that she was good at her job, was truly a force to be reckoned with. "Hello, Ms. Chandler. My name is Anita Blake. And you've made a lot of me and mine very unhappy this week."

She had half-turned around and looked up when I opened the door, but her face hadn't shown any disturbance or surprise. She had a very good blank face, a calm serenity I was sure had led more than one man to call her an ice bitch. She said, "Ms. Blake," and nodded, then stopped talking.

I wondered, suddenly, if she'd been hurt in some way, no, not hurt, lived in an abusive situation. There are, in my experience, two ways a person can gain the sort of placid demeanor she was demonstrating. One was a serious study of one of the more meditative disciplines, a very reflective, balanced martial art or certain religious orders. And the other, and far more likely to meet me, path to stillness is when one has to learn to be a ghost in one's home, a stillness taken so you can hide while the bad man (sometimes a woman, but more often a man) is around. I didn't say anything here, just came and sat on the sofa against the wall, next to Cherry. Claudia and Fredo flanked the couch.

I kept my silence and waited for her to break.

Cherry broke first, which annoyed me, but probably couldn't be helped. She got up and went to the kitchenette. I could hear the water running in the sink. She didn't come back.

I waited again, after Cherry was still, and I did start to feel stupid, sitting in silence, when I had arranged this little meeting. I promised myself just another ten seconds, and then I would talk, when Chandler said, "I didn't do anything wrong."

I shook my head and said, "I suppose that you didn't do anything wrong. You are not a wereanimal, and you had nothing from me, from any of us, in confidence."

"I'm not going to stop. As long as my source provides me with verifiable information, I'm going to keep printing." She didn't say this defiantly, but calmly, as if she were merely restating a well-known fact.

"Gilbert is not going to talk to you anymore after tonight."

She blinked and said. "I'm not going to confirm or deny that my source is a person named Gilbert. But what is the reason that Gilbert will not be talking to me after tonight? Are you going to injure him? Or kill him?"

"I'm going to tell him directly to stop talking to you."

"And he'll obey?" she asked. "That's very interesting. As far as I know, there are no wereleopards in St. Louis named Gilbert."

"Who said anything about wereleopards?"

"You are a wereleopard, Ms. Blake. You are the Nimir-Ra of the Blooddrinkers' clan." She smiled serenely.

I let my eyes go dead. There are medical records, there are hospital personnel, there are careless werefoxes to tell her that certain people in St. Louis were shapeshifters and lycanthropes. She should not have had our name, should not have had our words. I thought it very, very likely that I was going to have to kill Ms. Chandler, and i let that bleed into my eyes, so she could see it.

She swallowed, but she didn't move. I gave her points for that. "You're wrong," I said. "I am not a wereleopard. I've never slipped my skin, and I have no reason to believe I ever will."

That did get a reaction from her, eyes widened in surprise, a little dark with, I think, perhaps, dismay. "I have corroborating evidence, Ms. Blake."

I smiled at her, and it was not a nice smile. "I wasn't the only person you misidentified as a lycanthrope, you know?"

She got a set to her jaw and nodded. "When Alicia Jackson's autopsy results were made public, we printed a correction."

"You had corroborating evidence for her, as well?"

She shook her head. "Visual confirmation. I watched her changed."

"You didn't know there is more than one kind of shapechanging?" I raised an eyebrow, skeptical.

She shrugged. "It didn't seem important, to read up on anything other than lycanthropy. I figured any other shapeshifting would be Indian related, and we don't have many magic users left in the Indians in this area."


	39. Chapter 39

"That's not as true as you think." I smiled and showed a lot of teeth. "Preternatural medicine and biology are rapidly evolving fields, for one. And most of the non-lycanthropy shapeshifters come from some older magics, things inherited in family or passed down via what amounts to a very, very small secret society." I sighed. "But that's neither here nor there."

"Why have you arranged this meeting? If you wanted to offer evidence that you are not a wereleopard, that you wanted a retraction or correction, I assume you would have contacted my newspaper directly."

I nodded. "My reputation is not," I twitched my lips, trying to think how to put it without speaking out of turn, "those people who need my special skills and abilities have to work with me regardless of whether or not I'm a lycanthrope or shapeshifter. Those people I need to respect me for political reasons, they either know your story is in error or their respect for me would be increased by thinking I was a wereleopard. You haven't actually damaged me."

I saw, I _saw_ her muscles relax, and I know she didn't relax much. Then I glanced at a window and realised the sun had set and we were talking in the reflected glow of the street level lights below us as they bounced up from glass and the sprinkling of dirty slush we'd gotten this evening. "Would you care to have the lights on, Ms. Chandler?"

She blinked and nodded. "Thank you."

"Cherry!" I called. "Get the lights, please." I didn't want to move, not when something weird was going on, not when my senses were hyped above normal, not with a strange human in the room. And I don't ask bodyguards to do things that don't directly involve guarding my body.

Cherry came in and hit the lamps, one on either side of the couch, one next to the reporter, then she glided back into the kitchenette.

"If I haven't damaged you, then why?" she shrugged and waved one hand to the side of her.

"Sylvie Barker was not prepared to come out. She may lose her job," I said. "I believe your story got that poor mouse-woman killed. You haven't damaged me. But you have damaged people I concern myself with. And you threaten more."

She didn't shrug again, but she said, "I didn't kill anyone. I'm not Ms. Barker's boss or have any communication with her human resources department. And anyone I report as a shapeshifter in the future, I will be checking even more thoroughly their exact medical condition before I report it."

"How are you going to continue to report this story once Gil is out of the picture? No other shapeshifter in St. Louis will speak to you on this subject, and neither will any vampire allied with Jean Claude. Malcolm's flock are, by and large, ignorant of the doings of wereanimals."

"Not every shapeshifter in St. Louis has joined the Furry Coalition. And I've spoken with several members who feel your political agenda is," she licked her lips, "underdeveloped."

"What does that mean?" I said. The Furry Coalition wasn't really political, actually. We tried to provide information to government officials who would have to deal with us, like police and EMS, and we tried to assist members at the point of problems, but we weren't a lobbying group or anything.

"You'll have to ask them," she said.

"And you'll give me their names and phone numbers, of course." I blew out a breath slowly and said, "Look. I'm not out to bust heads on that. This is the first I've heard of Coalition members having problems with our political agenda. I actually would just like to know more precisely the words they used. So, what does that mean, underdeveloped?"

She looked at me straight on for several seconds, seeming to weigh something in the back of her mind. Then she said, "Are your reactions to this on the record?"

"Just the part about our political coalition. Nothing else we've discussed so far."

"Okay," she said. She leaned forward and picked up a notepad and pencil that had been lying on the coffeetable in front of us. She flipped back through her notes about thirty or forty pages, then said, "They fault you for not working on civil rights. There's some who think you should be working on an analogue to racial justice. There are others who think AIDS is a better metaphor. But in any case, they agree that the Coalition should be doing more work to combat prejudice in the general population, and to spread information about how to safely interact with lycanthropes."

I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. I wasn't in this to become a leader of men. Or animals. I'd started the Coalition because one time, a cursed swan had managed to sell out a large number of lycanthropes to extreme hunters, and another time, a serial killer had worked his way through most of St. Louis' large animal groups before anyone had gotten it together enough to tell me, instead of just telling the cops some humans had disappeared. I thought of the Coalition as a protective organization, not a political action committee. I could see why a political action committee might be needed. God knows I had done enough politicking to prevent the abuse of zombies. But I wasn't sure, no, I was almost positive I was the wrong person to lead it. I didn't know if Micah was the right person, or if someone else in the community might be.


	40. Chapter 40

"Well?" asked Chandler.

"I think that they're right and they're wrong. We—" I shook my head started over, "I'm _not_ a lycanthrope, but I do think that lycanthropes and magic users in general need a better political and public face than the Furry Coalition. But I don't think the Coalition is necessarily the organization to fight the political fights. Nobody who works for it currently has any government lobbying or PR experience, and their hands are full doing the job the coalition was created to do." I closed my mouth and thought about whether or not there was anything else I wanted to say. "Okay, that's all you're getting on the record."

"That's it?" she said.

"That's all I have to say about what you said they said." I leaned forward. "Now, tell me about your connection to the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve."

She stood up and started grabbing her things. "I'm not discussing that with you."

My bodyguards, strangely, moved to stand between me and her. "She's afraid, and she's got a gun. It's in her purse, right now," whispered Eduardo to me.

"Ms. Chandler," I said. "Did they take you, too? Did they bury you alive and leave you to die?"

"I wish," she said.

At that, I had to get up and look around my guards to look at her. Trapped in a little black box was, well, it wasn't my worst nightmare, but it was the worst one I had where people weren't actively torturing me. The penny dropped. "But you're human. Why would they have taken you and done whatever they did to make getting buried alive seem like a good alternative?"

"I don't know why they thought I was a lycanthrope. Best I can figure, there was a bad batch of vaccine around the time I got vaccinated, and they assumed I got some of it." She plopped down on the couch, eyes too wide, her peaches-and-cream skin paling to a chalky white.

I got up and sat down next to her. I kept her on the opposite side of me from my gun, but I put my left hand on her knee, lightly to see if she would take the comfort.

She turned around and grabbed on to me, suddenly, wrapped her arms around me. I stiffened, managed to pull my right arm free. I looked at the bodyguards over her shoulder and rolled my eyes down and to my right. If she was going to hang all over me (and it looked she would, and I was going to let her to get the whole story) then I wanted my gun a lot further out of her reach until I knew what the story was, and how she felt about it, and me, and shapeshifters in general.

Eduardo picked up the signal, and grabbed both my piece and her purse. He got bonus points for that, in my book.

I patted awkwardly at Charlene's back and said, "Tell me what happened to you, if you want."

"They grabbed me. I was walking home after work, and a short, heavyset older woman came up. She looked like somebody's grandmother. She started to say something to me, then I felt something hit me from behind, and I came to in a room with no windows, just drywall, some folding chairs, and the cage they had me trapped in. And there was a table of," she shuddered, violently, "instruments. They used them on me for a week. They wore suits, full-body cleaning suits with facemasks and hoods. They kept telling me to change, to show my true nature." I could feel moisture on my shoulder, and her voice got thicker on the next part. "They didn't do anything that was permanently injurious. It was all very painful, but it wasn't _damaging_, that wasn't what they were interested in." She pulled back from me, looked me in the face. We were close together, and it was intimate. She was a little shorter than me, so I looked down into her face. Her composure was gone, and I saw fear in the crumpled line of her mouth, but rage glittered in her eyes. "They had a fight about it, on the fifth day, when I hadn't shown the least sign of changing. One of them said that the mistake the Inquisition made was that their tests killed anyone who wasn't a witch, that's why no one took them seriously anymore." She snorted violently, drew her hand up to her face to wipe away the snot that threatened to enter her mouth. "On day seven, they drew some blood, and they knocked me out again. I woke up in the ER." She shook her head. "They'd dropped me off on the steps of a church, sometime after night Bible study started."

"How did you know it was them?" I asked.

She drew back a little then, not fast like I'd affronted her, but more as if she'd cried herself out, and was pulling herself back together. "That's what they called themselves. I mean, while they were torturing me, they kept asking if I was a Daughter of Eve. And when they were comparing themselves to the Inquisition, that's what they said. 'The Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve will learn from their mistakes' and stuff like that."

"Wow," I said. "I mean wow." I put my arms down from where I'd had them around her, but I put my hand back on her knee. "I've never been held that long. Consecutively, I mean. All together, I've probably been held and tortured that long, but not for that sustained length."

"Well," she said, and she ran her hand over my left arm, "I don't have any souvenirs, so that's another difference between us."

I nodded and looked around for a box of tissues or something, anything, I could give her to fix herself up. Cherry came up to us with a box of tissues and a glass of water. Chandler took both. I gave her a second to wipe her face and blow her nose. Her makeup was ruined, streaks of blush and mascara down her eyes, most of her lipstick rubbed off, but the color was back in her face, and the frighteningly complete control she had had at the beginning of our interview was gone. She took a deep breath and was probably about to say something, but I got there first.

"Knowing what you've told me now," I said, "how can you do this to us?"

"What?" she said.

"These people tortured you because they thought you were a lycanthrope. You're one of the few fully human who can say with authority that anti-lycanthrope prejudice is deadly. But you're forcing people out of the closet who don't want to be. How do you," I shrugged, "how do you put those two things together in your head? How do you make those both work out to be okay?"

"If it's not a secret, then it's less dangerous. When people get to know gay people personally, they're less homophobic. When they have to interact with black people or whatever as equals, they're less racist. It's the fear and the hiding and the unknown…." She sat back, pulled her hair back with her hands. "If everyone who was a lycanthrope was public about it, the Sons and Daughters wouldn't have picked me up, because they would have known I wasn't a lycanthrope."

"Are you listening to yourself? They wouldn't have tortured you because they would have picked up an actual shapeshifter and actually killed him. That's not an _improvement_, from my point of view. I'm not a shapeshifter, but my live-ins are. My best friend—." I stopped, took a breath. Louis wasn't out, and I was going to try not to out him to a reporter. "Making hate crimes more accurately focused is not an argument _for_ outing people."

She shook her head. "That's not what I meant. I meant, if people knew they knew lycanthropes, then groups like the Sons and Daughters wouldn't get more members. People wouldn't join them, because they would know their prejudice was unfounded."


	41. Chapter 41

I looked at her like she was an alien. In some sense, I guess she was an alien. The thought that people knowing there were more lycanthropes than they thought, that knowing the neighbor across the street turned furry and chased rabbits once a month, that that would somehow solve the problem, it struck me as hopelessly naive. Unworkable as a solution. Untenable as a strategy. And yet, I could see, also, how people would not believe that problems for shapeshifters were problems for people until they knew shapeshifters that were people.

But the greater part of the difficulty with her strategy, the thing that kept me from running out in the street and endorsing it, is that lycanthropes are truly different. They're not just people with a lunar-driven skin condition. They are stronger, faster, more prone to rage, more perceptive in a lot of important ways, deeply hierarchical in a way that America's egalitarian dogma couldn't support. I didn't want to say taht the problem with treating shapeshifters like they're people is that they're not people, but it seemed clear to me that the difference between a mundane human being and a lycanthrope was a lot bigger than the difference between a black person and a white one, or me and a lesbian. Er, between Richard and a gay man. Between the _Pope_ and a gay man. Kinsey 0 and Kinsey 6? Yeah, between a straight person and a gay one.

It didn't matter to me though. The essential thing was that Chandler hadn't given anyone up to the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve. She'd been their victim herself, and she thought, in some misguided, liberal guilt way, that her exposure of me and others as lycanthropes would end their reign of terror. She was wrong, but I wasn't going to hurt her. Not directly.

I probably was going to take Irving's suggestion, though, and offer her newspaper interviews in exchange for spiking the outings. And I was going to pass the word that no one in St. Louis was to talk to her. She could try to write more exposure stories after that, but she'd be confined to unethical medical records holders and people who got arrested. If lycanthropy had gotten into official documentation, it was only a matter of time before you were forced out of the closet by the circumstances of life, anyway.

"You're wrong," I said. "You can't change the rest of the world by outing us. Lycanthropes, they are dangerous. It's not like race or something, where the differences, if there are any, are big picture averages that don't mean anything on an individual basis. Even the weakest of lycanthropes is stronger than a human being, and they all grow teeth and claws and have the urge to kill. You're just wrong about knowledge and intimacy making the shapeshifting seem less scary. It takes more than knowing someone casually."

"You got over it," she said, softly, pointedly.

I nodded. "That's because I learned the difference between someone who would kill me because they were hungry and I was scared, and someone who would kill me because they enjoyed the doing of it."

She opened her eyes wider, raised her eyebrows. "Is that like the difference between a werewolf and a vampire or something?"

I shook my head. "It's the difference between a predator and a sociopath."

\--The cemetery had been a bad idea for a place to meet Gil. I mean, I had mostly picked it for theatricality. I wasn't really planning to kill him tonight, but I wanted the possibility to exist clearly in his mind. But I'd forgotten what had happened to me with Micah in Minnesota, forgotten the lively dead that came when too much of my power was that of shapeshifters, and not nearly enough was of the dead. I could feel everything in this cemetery, feel that some of it wanted out of its grave, wanted to dance and play in the wind of my power.

I shivered and I paced outside of the cemetery, refusing to enter. I was waiting for the pard to bring Gil out, into the parking lot that abutted it. I figured that would be a little safer. My other thought had been to draw a circle of protection, but I didn't want to cut my own finger with that many shapeshifters just after the moon, and I didn't want to use blood so powerful in a cemetery teetering on the edge of life. Safer all around to trust in the power of poured asphalt to keep us safe for a little while longer, I thought.

"I'm sorry," said Gil, as he was dragged in front of me. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt anyone, I just want to stop being afraid. I just want it to be better. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"Gil," I said, and I touched his face, made him meet my eyes. He was kneeling in front of me, and he shuddered at my touch. I think he thought I might rip his face off. Raina, the werewolves' last lupa, might have done it. But Raina was a sadist. "Gil, when you asked for my protection, you promised not to hurt anyone."

"I know," he wailed. "I didn't think I was. I didn't think there would be hurting. I didn't know about you and Sylvie! I didn't know someone would kidnap you! I told Chandler about alphas because I thought you could protect yourselves. Only the strongest, I told her the names of only the strongest."

"Gil, that wasn't your choice to make, was it?" I whispered it to him.

He shook his head and closed his eyes. "No, I should have asked. Should have talked. Should have begged permission. But I hate being so afraid. I can take it, I can understand it, it's fine, good to be afraid of the alphas. Not afraid, I mean. Respectful. Yeah, respectful. That's good." He nodded to himself. "But the human beings, I hate being afraid of them. Not knowing which are dangerous, whose carrying silver because they think I'll do something. Me? Little Gil. Soft Gil. Sweet Gil. But—."

I put one hand over his mouth to shut him up, used the other to prop open his eyes. His pupils were dilated, but he'd been in the dark in the cemetery waiting for me for hours. They were even, but still. "Did you guys hit him really, really hard on the head or something? I don't remember him being like this the last time he was around."

Caleb shrugged at me, and Zane shook his head. "I smelled drugs on him when we picked up, Anita, but we didn't injure him when we took him."

"Well, hell," I said. "I'm not sure it's any use punishing him while he's high." I looked down, directly at Gil. "Make no mistake, you will be punished. I'm going to have Caleb and Zane kick your ass tomorrow, after you sober up."

Gil shuddered under my hands, the plastic ties they'd secured his hands and feet with rustling like an autumn storm. "Yes, ma'am."

"But we're not going to kill you."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"You are going to talk to every single member of the coalition, and find out what ideas they have for advancing us politically, and what they're willing to do to advance the cause. You are going to talk to each of them in person, and you are going to report what each of them says, and if they ask why is someone from such a small group of such a low status doing this job, you are going to say, and say proudly, that _you_ started us on the path to political work with your snitching to the paper about political identities. And you're going to tell them that Anita said it was okay to beat you so long as whatever was done would heal in twenty-four hours. You got all that?"

Gil burst into tears, but through the tears, he muttered, "Yes, ma'am. Yes. I'll do everything you say. I'm so sorry."

"Shut it," I said. Then I looked at Caleb and Zane. "Did you catch everything I said to him? Can you explain his assignment when he sobers up?"

They nodded and smiled at me, and looked a little too eager to beat up on a weakling. I wasn't happy that I was passing this guy off, that I wasn't handling his punishment with my own two hands, but that was just the problem. I wasn't as strong as a shapeshifter, even a weakling like Gil. And I meant it, that I didn't want him dead. What he'd done, as far as I could tell, had been done without malice, even if it had ended with things that were cruel. I just couldn't kill someone for idiocy, but I physically couldn't administer the beating that such supreme stupidity deserved. So, I was delegating.

"Gil, tell me. Is there anything else I should know about what you did? Was there anyone else you told about alphas? Anyone else you fed information? Anyone else you told Chandler about?"

"Richard," he said. "I told her the name of the wolf king."

"What?" I said. I shook him, hard, and although he outweighed me by a good fifty pounds, I shook him hard enough his head bobbled dangerously. If I hadn't been so furious, I would have been worried. As it was, I was just interested in making sure he continued to have the ability to talk, and that was the only reason I stopped. "What did you do?"

"I gave her Richard Zeeman's name. The rat king, the hyena king are out already. So I gave her the masters that were not out: the snake leaders, you, the Geri, and the Ulfric. She told me it would be a big story in today's paper. I don't know why it didn't go out, but she still has that information."

I threw him down on the ground and kicked him several times myself. Then I told Zane and Caleb that they could beat him now and they could beat him up later.

\--"Richard, pick up your goddamn phone." I turned in my seat to look at Nathaniel. "Drive faster, damn it."

"No," he said. "I can heal if we're in a car accident. You can probably heal. But the people we run into with your giant death machine may not be so lucky, Anita. I'm not going to kill someone tonight just to save Richard's secret identity. This isn't even going to do that. If you wanted to stop the paper, you'd be going to their printing plant, not having me rush you to Richard's house."

"I don't know what Richard is going to want to do. We need to find out from him before we do anything stupid."

"Like run over some people?" asked Nathaniel. Then he stopped talking, started weaving in and out of the highway traffic. Despite my nagging him about the speed, he was going fairly fast, and he was pushing us beyond slower traffic, gathering more outraged honks than he ought to.

"Damn it, you're right. I just, I just don't know why Richard isn't answering his phone."

"I know this is a crazy idea," said Micah, in a voice that clearly indicated that he wasn't about to propose a crazy idea, he was just tired of me and my craziness, "but why don't you _use the marks to telepathically communicate with Richard_?"

I'd rejected the idea out of hand when we'd started heading for the jeep. I didn't know what Richard was doing or who he was with, and if he was going to, ultimately, want to try to kill the newspaper story in whatever way, then I didn't want to do anything to cut off that option for him. But we'd been calling his phone for about twenty minutes and not getting an answer, and we were still twenty minutes from his house, with no real assurance that he would be at his house when we got there.

"Okay, okay," I said. "You're right. Just, just give me a minute to make this work." I didn't really need space or a minute or any of that. Richard was always with me, I had to shield to keep him out. Feeling him telepathically was mostly a question of letting the shield thin, and sending a thought. It was easy as breathing, and I did it and sent, _Richard?_, to him, as gently as I knew how.

_Help_ was what I got in return, help and the image of a windowless room, and people in clean suits, with hoods and masks.


	42. Chapter 42

There was a scent around him, of blood. I got that, too. The blood was his own. He hadn't been able to get to the people in the clean suits, or he would have bitten them.

I could tell, because the smell was so strong, because the perspective on teh visuall was so low, that they had gotten him to transform to his full wolf form. Which, god, this was so fucked. So, so, so fucked up. Had Chandler lied to me about working with the Sons and Daughters? If she had, then finding her, and making her talk, whatever I had to do, was the best bet. But if she hadn't lied, if there was some Daughter of Eve working in the newspaper plant who had passed the news about Richard along to these crazy people, then Chandler was a distraction Ic ouldn't afford.

I decided to split the difference, and call Detective Tammy. I knew Richard had wanted to keep his identity secret, but the Sons and Daughters killed people. I wasn't going to fuck around with his life for an anonymity that was getting blown in tomorrow's headlines anyway.

"Nathaniel, pull over!" I shouted. "I don't know where we're going, but they're not at Richard's house." I started to go through the contact menu of my phone, and cursed myself for not putting somebody, anybody in RPIT on speed dial, when a masked number rang in. Normally, I wouldn't answer an unknown number, but, in this case, it was way too late at night to be a telemarketer and I couldn't help but think it was not a coincidence that I was getting a call right after I'd made contact with Richard.

"Anita Blake," I answered.

"Ms. Blake," a woman purred into my ear. Her voice sounded familiar, but I couldn't place.

"I'm sorry, is this a client? I've canceled all my appointments for tonight, and I really have to go."

I was just about to hang the button to hang up when the woman said, "This is Claire Van Deusel, and, if the rumors are true about you and the creature before me, I'm sure you don't have anywhere to go except where I tell you."

"Where are you? Where is _he_?" I wanted to ask why she was doing this, but I knew the answer: fear and rage. It was always some combination of fear and rage that led people to hurt others if they weren't complete sociopaths.

"You had an interesting little escapade the other day. With a creature named Sylvie. I want you to go there now."

"That's not where Richard is," I said. "Where's Richard?"

"You'll receive more instructions there, about what we want and what we need. You will not see the creature again until we allow it. Of course I won't give you his location, foolish girl." She hung up.

I didn't know what else to do except tell Nathaniel to go to the cemetery.

"Do you want to call the cops?" asked Micah. "You haven't done anything illegal on this one. And you don't know anything you have to keep hidden."

It was true. I usually had to keep the cops out of threats to me and mine, because it was either shapeshifter business or vampire business, and the paranormal world had its own parallel sets of rules and enforcers. But this was humans attacking us, and, further, attacking us unprovoked. All Richard had done was exist, and they were coming after him, which was completely unacceptable. The only problem with calling the cops was that I probably wouldn't be allowed to kill the ones who had hurt Richard. There was no doubt in my mind that they'd hurt him to get him to change, after what Chandler had told me.

I didn't want to let them go unpunished in that sense, but my priority was to get Richard back alive, and the police were just plain better investigators than I.

"Dolph, I need to report a kidnapping," I said, breathless and worried sounding. "Richard Zeeman's been taken by the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve."

"Richard Zeeman, your ex-boyfriend? He's the last human guy you ever dated, yeah?"

"He's a werewolf. That's why they took him."

"How long ago did they get him? They don't hold on to their victims too long."

"I don't know how long, but they've made him change shape. They called me. Fucking Claire Van Deusel called my cellphone! She told me to go to the cemetery where they buried me and Sylvie alive, but it was pretty clear that she wasn't taking Richard there to meet me. She told me there would be further instruction for me there."

"Did she give you a time limit?"

I blinked, and thought about our conversation. I hadn't paid much attention to anything she said that wasn't Richard's location, but, "No, she did not. It was implied that I was going right away, but she didn't tell me I had to. We're headed there right now, though."

"We?"

"Nathaniel's driving and Micah is with us."

"Why, Anita?"

I tried to remember if the information about the outing had come from my legal, human-like conversation with Chandler, or the mafialike assault on Gil. Damn, it was Gil. "Personal stuff," I said.

"Personal?"

"Personal, as in, it had to do with relationship sex type stuff that doesn't matter here at all."

"whatever," he said. "Just, Anita, if this personal stuff comes back and bites us when we're trying to get your boyfriend, it's on your head."

"I can talk to him," I offered. "Psychically, I mean, I can talk to him."

"For real?"

I nodded, then said, "Yeah. He's in a place, it looked like a similar set up to where they had that reporter Claire Chandler, when they kidnapped her."

"The Sons and Daughters don't kidnap human beings."

"She said they thought she was a shapeshifter."

"Interesting," said Dolph, but he didn't elaborate. "Anita, don't go to the graveyard. There's a park about a mile away. Wait for us there, and we'll figure out a plan of attack. You keep in contact with Zeeman, call me back if anything new happens to him."

I would have said okay to all of that, but Dolph hung up first.


	43. Chapter 43

The park was empty when we arrived, the air was freezing, the trees iced. I couldn't feel much life in the forest around us, so much hibernating and banked. There was death in it, but they were small deaths, rodents, starved predators, insects. Nothing to get excited about. Nothing to draw on, if I should need it.

I was waiting for the call from Mrs. Van Deusel, the shocked outrage that I had not yet arrived. Failing that, I expected Richard would reach out to me again, give moe more information, but that wasn't happening either. I felt unbalanced, more afraid than angry. The Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve were too shadowy, too nebulous for me to focus my anger on. I didn't know who to shoot, what way to point my gun, and while that was upsetting, it meant there was no focus for all of that upset.

Micah had crawled into the front with Nathaniel and me, and the three of us were tangled in an uncomfortable knot, waiting for something, anything to happen. with most people, I would have had a fight about keeping my gunhand free, but while Nathaniel was wrapped around my feet, and Micah stuck like a burr to my left side, they had both left the right hand and shoulder holster clear. The carheater, the whole engine was off. I wanted to be able to hear anything coming, and they were warm enough that I wasn't cold. If we were much longer, we'd get blankets from teh back. Micah and Nathaniel ran hot, but they were not, in actual point of fact, autonomic space heaters, and I knew that. But I felt the tension rising in me, felt that things were going to happen sooner rather than later, and blankets were just one more thing to get tangled up in.

My phone rang, and I didn't jump out of my skin. I wasn't startled because I'd entered a strange, hallucinatory state where I was ready for anything and everything. "Anita Blake," I said when I answered.

Marian, my psychic advisor said, "Anita, you can't wait any longer. You have to go to the house."

"My house?" I asked.

Marian waited a second, and then said, "No, the universe says it's her house. She's a liar, but she's not dangerous."

"Okay," I said. "Thanks."

"You know, we need to work on your psychic abilities. I don't exactly mind passing messages for the Lord and Lady, but what if your batteries were dead."

"You would have called Micah or Nathaniel first, if my batteries were dead," I said, and I hung up.

I called Irving and said, "Where does Chandler live? And why didn't you tell me she was involved with the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve?"

Irving muttered incoherently at me for several seconds, but he eventually croaked out, "As far as I know, Chandler doesn't have any political affiliations. She did a big feature on the Sons and Daughters about six months ago, but what's that go to do with—. Oh, shit, Anita, who have they got?"

"Her address, Irving. I need it now."

He rattled it off, and I repeated it to Nathaniel, who had unslung himself from my feet and climbed back in the driver's seat. Micah was in the rear, too. They'd both moved into position when I got off the phone from Marian.

I called Detective Tammy and told her where I was going and why. I didn't call Dolph directly because I was, frankly, giving myself more time to beat the shit out of Chandler, if that's what was necessary to get her to cough up a location. I didn't particularly care if I wound up in jail for assault, or murder. If Richard died, he would probably take me and Jean Claude with him. And if I died, Damian would, and possibly Nathaniel. Asher would be in charge of St. Louis, and I just wasn't sure that he was ready to take care of everyone and everything if Jean Claude and I went down. It wasn't just self-defense, it was the whole city I would be protecting.

\---I had my really big knife against Chandler's throat. I hadn't drawn blood yet, but that was the next step.

"I don't know where they are. I'm telling you the truth. I don't know where I was held, I don't know where they keep prisoners."

"I have it on excellent authority," I said, "that you are a liar. And further, I don't have much time. So, you're coming with me. You're coming with me right now, and you're going to—" I choked. Not metaphorically, I suddenly couldn't breathe, it felt as if there were dirt in my mouth and nose, and no way to get oxygen. _Anita_! Richard screamed in my mind, and the darkness and the smell of the earth filled me, and I was blind.

Then there was a touch on my back, and everything was clear again. Nathaniel had his arm around me. Micah had a secure grip on Chandler. My knife had fallen to the floor. I picked it up, and said, "Where do they bury them alive?"

"They use the cemetery where you were found. I don't know of any other—."

I turned and walked out. I was a fool. The she the universe had told me about was Mrs.Van Deusel. And the home, there were mausoleums in that graveyard. I was betting the Van Deusels had one. I raced to the jeep and got in the driver's seat. Micah and Nathaniel tumbled in right behind me, and I peeled off right away, without even waiting for them to buckle their seatbelts. I always wait for people to buckle up. My mother died in a car crash she would have survived, had she been wearing her seatbelt.

I drove faster than the speed limit. I crowded smaller cars, and pulled into spaces in the flow of traffic too small for my vehicle. We were roughly twenty minutes away from the cemetery, in the normal course of events. I made it there in ten.

I stopped the car in the parking lot. One other car was there, a non descript four door in that gold/tan color they sold a million of a couple of years ago.

The police were gone, off to Chandler's on the wild goose chase I'd set them. I hadn't had time to call myself, hadn't thought to tell Nathaniel or Micah where we were going. They hadn't asked, but it meant we would be without backup.

Or so I thought, until I saw Jamil and Shang-da appear out of the woods. I didn't know where they had come from, but at this point, I didn't really care. I heard a car pull up behind us, and out came Sylvie, her girlfriend Gwen, and Requiem, London, Wicked and Truth. The vampires had weapons, swords and short knives both. Sylvie was in a ratty sports bra and shorts, Gwen likewise. Jamil was naked. Shang-da was wearing slacks and boat shoes and a metric fuckload of guns.

I got out of the car and headed for the gates of the cemetery.

I could feel the cemetery grounds, restless, uneasy. The graves called to me, the bodies underneath them practically dancing with energy. Richard was here, and Micah and Nathaniel, three shapeshifters to whom I was tied. The night was alive because the animator was filled with lycanthropic magic.

So, I asked the grounds around me to show the way, point me to where the living could be found, where that which didn't belong, the breathing in the ground, was. I can't explain where I knew how to go. It wasn't that a path was lit under my feet, or there was a scent trail to follow like a cartoon character attracted by pie. I didn't have a map in my head of the cemetery. The closest I can come to describe it is like an internal game of hot/cold, where I knew the next step toward the wrongful life that disturbed the sleepers' rest.

We ran, the shapeshifters and I, ran on a hunt, a very strange hunt, as there were no trees or pushes to dodge, just unmoving, unhelpful gravestones and gothic weeping angels, the occasional family crypt. But it was a hunt, and lest I mistake that, Shang-da let out a fearsome baying, which the other wolves picked up and my two cats followed up with a hunting yowl. I looked around me for a second and saw that everyone except Shang-da and Nathaniel had gone to a half-man form for hunting. Nathaniel was all cat, and Shang-da was completely human shaped, so he could handle the weapons. They were beautiful and frightening and reassuring.

We got to the crypt and the door was open. There was a glow coming from it, and voices, shouting. I couldn't process the human noises, couldn't make them resolve into words, that was not the point right now, not the thing with which I needed to concern myself. Sylvie got to the men inside the crypt first, knocked them out of our way and down as they took aim at us with giant tranquilizer guns.

I didn't watch to see what happened to them, I trusted everyone to be able to take down four puny human beings. Instead, I grabbed a shovel and started digging. I hoped, trusted, prayed that Richard had been buried in a box and not just covered with dirt, as had happened to Sylvie and I, but I just wasn't sure. I dug as fast as I could, and, shortly, I was joined by Micah and Gwen. Gwen used her hands, which were formed into enormous paws with an opposable thumb. The thumb was useless for digging, but the paws she could use in a combination of scoop and shovel, could really dig with.

MIcah had enough manual dexterity that he could use the other shovel lying on the ground. He was taller and had a longer reach in his catman form, and we started hitting the dull thunk of a box within ten minutes. The sounds of battle had died off behind us, but I didn't really care about the background noise as long as nothing behind me stopped me from digging.

We got the box clear, and Micah smashed the box in at one end. It was the end above Richard's feet, which was good, as splinters flew everywhere. Micah got one in his arm, but ignored it. He just ripped the lid of the box upward, and pulled.

I could see Richard. He was still in wolfshape, stretched out on his belly so he'd fit in the box. He was knocked out somehow. I guess they'd injected him with a massive sedative. Micah reached in the box and pulled him up, lifted him out of the grave until Sylvie could grab Richard and tug him backwards toward me. I put my arms around him and I could feel the life of him, slower than usual, heart beat down to a human normal, skin temperature cooler than my own, but clearly, vitally alive. "Oh," I said. "Oh. Thank god. Thank you, God." It was a prayer in my mouth, and I meant it, I truly meant it, for without God's intervention via a phone call to Marian, I didn't know that we would have gotten here in time.

I got a feeling back, the feeling I sometimes I get when I pray. Except it was more this time. Usually the feeling is simply one of acknowledgement, a knowledge that I've been heard. It's not a guarantee that I'll get what I want, which is what people _usually_ mean by prayers being answered. But this time, the response I got felt a lot more like approval and affection. I took it.

\---Dr. Lillian showed up a little while after we got Richard out of the ground, and the cops showed up about fifteen minutes after her. The vampires, in a remarkable show of restraint, had managed to prevent shapeshifters from killing any of the human minions, so none of us actually did get arrested. Richard was fine the next day, although the paper did go to press.


	44. Chapter 44

I called into work as we left the police station. I'd gotten tied up there a long time, because I had to talk the police officers through my revelation from Marian about where Richard was and how I'd misinterpreted it, several times. I was just lucky that Chandler had held off pressing charges. At some point, she was going to get to do some exclusive interviewing with Micah and some of the other public faces of the Furry Coalition. I don't know how that agreement got made (I didn't talk to her), but I was just glad not to be going to jail.

Also, Micah and I stayed around because we didn't want any of the shapeshifters going to a halfway house. Sylvie, Micah and Jamil had changed back their shapes before the police got there, but Gwen and Nathaniel were still in their animal forms. Micah had kept his arms around Nathaniel, and Sylvie had stayed cuddled around Gwen, but every one from RPIT kept their gun hands clear for the first couple of hours we were trying to straighten the whole mess out.

Gwen changed first. She wasn't anything like an alpha werewolf, but she was a naturally stronger wolf than Nathaniel was a wereleopard. I was still surprised, though, because Nathaniel had gained a lot of power as my leopard to call. I wondered if Damian was all right, and I blanked out for a few moments, following my thoughts to him. It was daylight, so it was harder to get a reading on him, but I didn't think he was in any trouble yet. I needed to feed though, needed to feed the ardeur, as I hadn't since the night before with him and Nathaniel. Since I couldn't do that with cops all around me, I went ahead and ate all of the bad vending machine food I could scam someone into bringing me, and I even convinced Arnet to go and get us a bunch of Kristy Kreme. I was pretty pleased with myself, as Arnet pretty much hates my guts. I paid for it, so I hate half the box and felt no shame whatsoever. Micah kept frowning at me, because Krispy Kreme is pretty much carbohydrates and fats, no protein, which is what a wereanimal really needs. I ignored him, because I was starving, and the donuts were helping with that.

When Nathaniel finally changed back into his human form, we were able to get him a blanket and get out of there, though. We stopped at a drive through so everyone could get something meaty, if not delicious, and went home.

There was a car parked in front of the house, one I didn't recognize at all.

I was sorely tempted to tell Micah to just turn back around and take us into town to the Circus. By rights, that's where we should have gone in the first place. In our exhaustion, we'd forgotten, and gone back home. A month of punishment hadn't really changed the place we lived in our hearts.

And the fact that it was home, that it was a place where we'd made ourselves happy together, was the reason I didn't tell Micah to turn around, we didn't call the cops to get them to come out and deal with who or whatever was causing the problem for us. This was our place, and we would defend it.

My animating kit was in the back of the trunk, so I got the machete out for Micah. Nathaniel carried my backup piece. He knew how to use it. I'd made him learn. Micah had no problem with hunting rifles, but he wasn't so great with handguns, so he got the bigass knife.

We approached the house as quietly as we could, although, if the bad guys were paying any attention, they would have heard us drive up. I didn't know if they were paying attention or not. They couldn't be very competent bad guys, because they'd parked in a place to give us warning they were there.

We opened the door carefully, the guys stood back and low, and I crouched to the side and low. I opened the door and nothing came through it. I was a little surprised to be honest. If I had been doing this, I would have sent a gun shot blast through the first person to open the door. But, then again, they'd left their car out front to warn us they were there. Maybe they didn't intend to blow us away all at once. Maybe they had more intricate plans.

I frowned. I hate it when the bad guys have intricate plans. Usually they're more painful than a straightforward, "Kill them all."

Mrs. Van Deusel's voice drifted out into the morning air. "Come, now, Ms. Blake. I know you're out there. You know I'm in here. No need to be coy."

And then I remembered that the message via Marian had specified that she's a liar. It was why I had thought the universe was pointing me at Chandler, I had thought they'd meant that Chandler had lied to me about being a Daughter of Eve.

"I'm not coy, I'm cautious," I said. "I know that whatever you have planned, it's a trap, so I don't feel like cooperating with you at all."

"I know," she said, and her voice carried a hint of anger now. "I know that you do not cooperate. You would not search for souls for us, you would not be one of us, you would not go where you were bidden. I know you are the least cooperative of women, oh you, Daughter of Lillith, Child of the Serpent."

I blinked. I'd been insulted many times, but never quite so biblically. Also, with such mixed metaphors. I looked at Nathaniel, who only shrugged in confusion, and Micah, who mirrored my conviction that Mrs. Van Deusel was not only a liar but off her rocker.

"Mrs. Van Deusel, I'm afraid I don't know what test you're talking about," I said. I figured that it couldn't really hurt to lure her into monologuing, and, if I was lucky, any co-conspirators in the house with her would announce their presence through the inevitable shuffling that occurs from waiting around. The only bodyguards I've ever met who could keep still for hours were dead ones.

"The test, the test, the test of the blood, Child of the Serpent."

"Test of the blood?" They hadn't found any cuts or scratches on me when they'd picked me up, not even from Sylvie's and my encounter, let alone evidence that they had drawn blood. But I healed faster than usual, as long as whatever cut me wasn't magically charged, and there was no evidence that the Sons and Daughters were magic workers or psychically gifted in any way.

"We stopped torturing people to determine if they were Sons of Adam or Daughters of Eve, if they were human beings."

"You guys are _Narnia_ fans?" Nathaniel burst out, unexpectedly. He blushed, abashed that he had spoken out of turn, but I shook my head, let him know it was okay. We were all running on way too little sleep, and it had been bothering me for a little while, that I should know that phrasing the Sons and Daughters used. I was just glad that I hadn't burst out laughing, as I was pretty sure that would have disrupted Van Deusel's monologue even more.

"We are admirers of Lewis, and his understanding that God has made this world to be ruled by men and women, not the beasts of the field," said Van Deusel, and her voice was a little defensive. I guess this wasn't the first time had accused her group of being a collection of overgrown, nerdy kids.

"So, instead of torture, now you do what?" I asked.

"The test of the blood," she shouted back. "Come in, Anita, I tire of this discussion at a distance. I have a cold."

"Wait, you mean the anti-body test? And, you shouldn't break into other people's houses when you're sick, if it's going to be so much of a burden on your health. No one cares about the wellbeing of those who rob or attack them." That was a pretty lame comeback, even for me, but her sally had been lame, too. Also, we were pushing hour twenty in a row of me being awake, so I was not in top form.

"Why are you playing with me, Child? Are you not worried about those who were here? Don't you want to know what has happened to the creatures you left in your house."

Shit. I didn't actually know who was here. I let the leopards crash pretty much at will, and I had sort of told Zane and Caleb to keep Gil with them until they beat him up. And Cherry and Zane might be back on again, it was sort of hard to tell with them. They were like a lower key versino of me and Richard. "Who do you have here?" I shouted. "Why don't you come out and bring your henchpeople and your hostages with you."

"No," she said. "You come to me. I'll guarantee safe passage if you, and only you, come in, Ms. Blake."

"Why do you _care_?" I asked. "What fascination do I hold for you people, anyway?"

"I told you the truth the first day we met."

"You want me to examine the souls of unborn infants?" This could not be about the goddamned soulspotting. I told her I didn't think ti would work, I told her it was creepy, and, also, there were other animators in the country she could get to try something like that.

Then I remembered what Zerbrowski had told me. "I'm only going to see the same thing everyone else sees. I'm more powerful, I'm not different than my fellow animators," I told her. That was sort of a lie. I was a necromancer, and a lycanthropy carrier, and a succubus, which I'm fairly certain none of my colleagues were. But I was also pretty sure that whatever it was about souls that my colleagues had seen, that they had been killed for, that that was what I was going to see, too.

"Fuck this noise," said a male voice from inside, and shots began to ring out.

Nathaniel and I dashed in the house, and started shooting at anyone who had a gun. There were five non-descript white guys bleeding on my floor, Zane and Gil knocked out in a corner, and Van Deusel holding Cherry to her, a silver knife to my wereleopard's throat, when the bullets stopped flying.

There was a moan behind me, and I turned to see Caleb holding his bloody hands to his torso. Damn it, we didn't have long to play this out, not long at all.

"What do you want?" I asked Van Deusel, again.

"I'm going to kill this Child of the Serpent, and then you're going to raise her from the dead. You're going to do it right away, and that will prove, once and for all, that creatures like yourself are just that, soulless creatures who should be put down for the safety of all humankind."

"What the fuck is _wrong_ with you, old woman?" I screamed. "Cherry never did a god damn thing to you. She's a nurse! She loves Chagall paintings and 70's art films and dancing like a maniac in tiny leather outfits. She has a mother and two sisters in Jersey who love her very much. Don't you dare kill her. Don't you cut her. Don't you hurt her. You do it, and I will cut _you_, old woman, I will put _you_ down like a dog." I was shouting, practically screaming, I was so pissed off, but my gun hand was rocksteady and pointed at Van Deusel's head.

"You won't do any of that," said Van Deusel. "This is being taped and broadcast, even as we speak. I can serve my cause by dying for it, but, you, you need to be availabe to your people for your cause to work. So, enough talk. I'm going to cut this thing's throat, and you're going to raise her, because the very frightened young man who was here before has been taken by my associates to a secure location, and he will also be killed if you don't—." She gurgled for half a second before Micah got the machete all the way through her neck.


	45. Chapter 45

The police didn't agree that I had a good reason for not calling them when I realized someone had broken into my home, but they couldn't argue that the Sons of Adam had started the shooting or that Micah had killed Van Duesel in order to save Cherry. The recording proved that everything we said was true.

It took too long for the cops to believe the part we told them about Gil having been taken to a second location. They had thought Gil was human, the Sons of Adam who had taken them. I don't know why they thought I would have had a human at my house for two wereleopards to beat up on, but that's all I can figure. Gil was a weakling, and a scaredy cat, but he was still a werefox, and it was still very close to the full moon. He killed and ate them before the cops showed up, and it was only because they were shooting lead bullets instead of silver that he survived what his rescuers did when they burst in on the scene. I felt bad, but everybody I would have sent with the police to make sure that sort of victim shooting didn't happen was with me in the police station being questioned about the scene in my house. Or dead for the day. I might have sent one of the vampires, but the sun was bright and shiny, and none of them were available.

Richard lost his job. It was pretty terrible. He couldn't be fired for cause, but the teachers' union representative that was supposed to help him plead his case, she was too scared to do him any good. They reassigned him to an administrative position in the central office, and he couldn't find any schools in the whole state that would take him.

I tried talking to him about doing the political thing, but he's not ready for that yet. I don't know if he'll ever be ready. I can't blame him. It would involve a lot of talking about himself, about how he's not a monster just because he gets furry and goes hunting naked in the woods. He believes he is a monster, and he doesn't know if he can lie to all of those people.

Micah, Nathaniel, Damian, and I are at the Circus for the time being. The police broke down my door and the Sons and Daughters had done a bang up job on the place before the shooting started. Also, Damian should have a place of his own, where he can bring women. He's sort of over wanting to have sex with me. I mean, he does still want to, but he doesn't want to until I want to, and he's accepted that that will probably be never.

I got Rafael, Micah, and the Swan King to do interviews with Chandler. Rafael did his under his legal name, but the Swan King only agreed to do it pseudonymously. The paper sold out anyway.

We're not exactly in a happy family place, but we're doing okay. My family called. They want to talk to me about taking up with shapeshifters. Somehow, in their minds, Jean-Claude is a respectable businessman, but Micah is a danger.

That might have something to do with the fact that some newspapers identified Micah as my live-in boyfriend, and others gave Nathaniel's name. Only the National Enquirer named MIcah and Nathaniel both, thank god. Micah was pissed off that some of the papers dug up the story of his attack. The newspapers who listed Nathaniel as my boyfriend didn't make the connection to the stripper Brandon, which is a small favor from I know not whom. But I am grateful for it.

Speaking of gratitude, I'm going to church more often. I mostly go with Richard, but sometimes I'm able to drag Micah in. Nathaniel doesn't exactly refuse, but somehow Sunday morning is always the day he has to wash his hair. But, to make it up to me, he does a killer spread for Sunday brunch, so I don't mind too much.

The house should be done by Valentine's Day. My dad and my Grandma Blake want to visit for President's Day weekend. I told them to bring my little brother. I figure I can run off with him to a gun range if the rest of the family gets to be too much.

It's a weird life, but it's mine. I'll take it. And I won't let anyone or any thing put it in danger. Not me, not my life, not the people I love. I've finally accepted that this is my life, with all of my men and all of the magic and all of the messiness. There's nothing I won't do for everybody. And I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they will do for me, too.


End file.
